Exodus

CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE

“It’s snowing,” said Rhiannon.

“What?”

“It’s. Snowing.”

Emily looked up from the road and saw fat flakes of white drifting slowly down from the sky. She had been driving for so long on this particular stretch of the Alaska Highway, mile after mile after dreary mile, that her mind had switched to autopilot and she hadn’t even noticed the blanket of gray clouds as they had moved in from the northeast.

According to the digital thermometer display, the temperature outside was thirty-two degrees. The temperature had dropped more than fifteen degrees over the past three days.

“Where are we?” Emily asked.

Rhiannon picked up the road atlas from the floor and thumbed it open to a dog-eared page. She traced their route with a finger, holding the book open and angled toward Emily so she could glance at it. “I don’t think it’s very far now. We just passed a sign for Eielson Air Force Base.”

Fairbanks was about another twenty miles or so farther northwest from the military base; another twenty minutes or so drive, Emily estimated.

The road they were driving was what passed for a two-lane highway but amounted to little more than two lanes of concrete with a median of brown grass between them. On either side of the road was an expanse of the equally dead grass. The grass terminated at a seemingly never-ending line of what she thought were silver birch trees. Whatever they were, their skinny trunks and naked branches became ridiculously monotonous after the first twenty miles or so.

When she had spoken with Jacob the previous night, he had told her to make sure her first stop was at a cold-weather outfitters.

“You need to find winter clothing. It’ll hit below zero before you know it, and I can guarantee you won’t want to be caught outside in any of your regular clothes,” he had told her. He’d given her directions to the store he used, and Emily had promised him they would head straight there as soon as they made it into Fairbanks.

Temperatures this far north could vary wildly. At this time of year, daytime temperature might reach thirty or even forty degrees, and at night, you would be lucky if the thermometer stayed above minus fifteen. “The right clothing is the difference between life and a very painful death,” Jacob had warned them.

They had stopped the previous night in a small town, weirdly named Tok. Setting out the following morning, it had struck Emily how normal the routine had become for her and Rhiannon. After their talk back in Calgary, all signs of the petulant little girl she had first encountered had completely disappeared as Rhia slipped willingly into the role of navigator.

And Emily had surprised herself at just how easily she had come to rely on Rhiannon. She had never given children a second thought in her life; there had never been enough time to even think about them or a man that she was willing to settle down with or who would be willing to put up with her. She loved the little girl, she realized. If she ever had a child of her own, she would hope that she turned out like Rhia.

“Watch out!” yelled Rhiannon, suddenly bracing her arm against the dashboard.

Emily’s attention had been lost in thought again, her eyes off the road, so she had failed to see the debris of the downed airplane splashed across the lane ahead of them. She hit the brakes and brought the Dodge to a screeching halt.

The wreckage looked to be of some kind of fighter plane, probably from the air base. It had crashed nose first into the north-bound lane, leaving a crater gouged out of the earth that stretched across all four lanes. Strangely, the nose of the plane was still intact, severed just behind the cockpit, which was missing its canopy and pilot’s seat. The pilot had probably ejected when he felt the oncoming effects of the red rain, Emily surmised. Lot of good that had done him.

The rest of the plane was nothing but blackened bits and pieces scattered across the ground.

“Sorry,” said Emily, turning to Rhiannon. “I guess I’m just tired.” Who knew sitting down for hours on end could be so exhausting?

Emily glanced up at the rearview mirror and put the SUV into reverse, backing up about twenty feet, then drove off the road and onto the field, steering around the wreckage of the downed aircraft.

Up ahead, on the right side of the road, Emily could see what looked like a line of adobe-colored blocks. She accelerated the Dodge back up to speed. The blocks quickly resolved into buildings and military aircraft hangars. A six-foot-high chain-link fence topped with razor wire surrounded the air base.

Emily slowed the SUV to a crawl as she eased past the main entrance. The guard post was deserted, but the metal security gate was down, blocking the entrance to the military buildings beyond it. She could make out vehicles parked uniformly off in the distance, and what looked like several commercial-size gray aircraft parked on one of the runways.

The crumpled skeleton of a helicopter, its tail snapped from its fuselage pointing skyward, sat alone in an open field. It was missing one of its rotor blades, and those that remained hung limply toward the ground.

There was no sign of life. No movement except for the flakes of snow that had now begun to settle on the grass and concrete of the road in front of them.

“Do you think the soldiers are alive in there?” Rhiannon asked.

Emily stared at the silent base. She had hoped that maybe, just maybe, the military had figured out how to survive the blood rain. If anyone could have, it would have been them. But that hadn’t been the case. Everyone here was dead.

“No,” she said with a final glance at the base. She drove on.

She wasn’t sure what she had expected from the town of Fairbanks. Maybe a small town full of single-wide trailers and strip joints. That was the impression she had always had of these ends-of-the-world kind of places; a backward whistle-stop of a place, in the middle of nowhere, populated by fat bearded men in plaid shirts and aging whores. Instead, as she finally pulled into the town, she found herself in a community that would have looked at home in any Midwest state. Pleasant-looking, well-kept homes, their lawns dead and brown now that no one was alive to maintain them, bland apartment buildings, a theater, a smattering of gas stations and car dealerships. The tiny houses were never going to appear on the cover of Better Homes and Gardens, but then again, nothing was.

Emily got the impression that even before everybody had died, this town had been, for the most part, quiet.

Slowly maneuvering through the empty streets, she turned right onto Second Avenue and immediately stomped on the brake. Ahead of her, in a plot of land that had once been a children’s playground, a cluster of alien trees sprouted from the ground. She had failed to notice them earlier because they were hidden by a phalanx of spruce trees lining the park’s border. There was something different about these invaders, something that was unlike the usual uniform, almost cookie-cutter versions that had become a daily sight since leaving Manhattan.

These were stunted and irregular. The usual black sheen that coated the bark was missing, and she could see gray splotches scattered across their trunks. Where their cousins south of Fairbanks stretched skyward for hundreds of feet, these barely reached the height of the crossbar of the playground’s swing set. They should have been towering over them by now.

Emily pulled the Durango to the curb and rolled down her window. A cold breeze stung her face, and she exhaled sharply, sending a pale cloud of vapor out into the atmosphere to mix with the vehicle’s exhaust fumes and the flakes of snow that still fell from the leaden sky. The air felt crisp and clean, knife-sharp against the back of her throat.

“Stay here,” she told Rhiannon to the whine of the window whirring back up. “I’ll be right back.”

Rhiannon just nodded her head. Thor shifted uneasily in the back, but Emily commanded him to stay.

Standing on the sidewalk, Emily shivered as a gust of wind sliced through her thin shirt, straight to her spine. She was going to have to find that cold-weather clothing store, soon. Already, a half inch of snow had settled on the low hedge at the front of the playground, and the pavement was quickly becoming slippery underfoot.

She was going to have to make this quick.

Following the path into the park, Emily walked past the set of swings, their rusty chains squeaking loudly in the breeze, and headed toward the group of scrawny-looking alien trees.

Emily froze—an appropriate term, she supposed, given how goddamn cold it was. In front of her, scattered around the base of the nearest trees like fallen leaves, were at least twenty of the spider-aliens, their ugly-ass heads staring straight at her.

Emily didn’t dare move. A day-long minute ticked by in her head as she stared at the creatures. Like the stunted alien trees behind them, there was something not quite right with them. In every encounter she’d had with the spider-things they had always been the alien equivalent of a hyperactive kid; always on the move, never still. In fact, she thought, the only one she had ever seen not moving had been long dead, impaled by the iron bars of a fence back in New York.

Dead! These things were dead…probably.

She took a tentative step forward. No movement from them. Then another step. Still no reaction. Emboldened, she took another step closer and another until she was standing next to the closest motionless alien. She prodded it with the tip of her sneaker. It didn’t move, frozen solid to the concrete playground. It was the same for the rest of them, all deader than dead, their carapaces hard and unyielding she found as she stomped down hard on one with her heel.

It was almost as if they had been flash-frozen, she thought. Caught out in the open when the temperature had dropped. More proof that Jacob had been right about the temperature all along.

Sure that they posed no threat to her, Emily turned her attention back to the deformed alien trees. They looked half-finished. Instead of the geometric keenness of the top edges that had defined the trees she had seen being built, these were irregular. Pieces were missing, and here and there were gaps, long seams that stretched up the tree like cracks. She squeezed two fingers into the gap. Her fingers slipped in all the way to the second knuckle. The gray splotches she had seen were in reality half-formed pieces of the tree; when she touched one, it cracked, sending a large section down into the interior of the trunk.

The red rain had accomplished its mission, killing everyone in the town, but the growth of the trees had been stopped in its tracks. It looked as though they had been completely unable to deal with the cold. Judging by the lack of growth of the trees and the dead aliens scattered around the base of the trees, she would not be surprised if she found thousands of the aliens, or maybe even their precursor pupae stages, scattered throughout the houses in the town. She would have to remember that when they looked for a place to spend the night.

She gave one of the dead spider-aliens a swift kick to the face, breaking off the thing’s frozen tentacles with a satisfying clink that sounded like shattered icicles.

“That’s for everyone in this town,” she said and walked back to the warmth of the SUV.

“What took you so long?” asked Rhiannon as Emily closed the door of the Durango and turned the heater up as high as it would go.

“Nothing. I just needed to check out the trees,” she replied as she felt the heat chase the frigidness from her fingers. Emily didn’t see any point in scaring Rhiannon with the news of the dead aliens.

“So, what are we supposed to do now?”

“How about I take us clothes shopping?” she answered.

The strip mall parking lot still held two cars. Their owners, presumably, had not heeded the warnings about the effects of the red rain and had perished while shopping. I guess there are worse ways to go, Emily thought as she pulled the Dodge to a stop out front of the store Jacob had directed her to.

Large red letters over the entrance to the building read FRONTIER OUTFITTERS, and below that in smaller letters: HUNTING. FISHING. CAMPING. APPAREL.

Emily grabbed the shotgun and her flashlight and stepped outside. She left the engine running not just for security, but also because it was so damn cold that the idea of waiting for the car to warm up again was not a pleasant thought.

“Stay here for a second while I check around,” she told Rhiannon. “Thor, come on.” The dog leaped from the backseat to the driver’s, then down onto the concrete. He stretched and followed Emily as she headed to the store’s entrance.

The door creaked open, and Emily pushed it open farther with the barrel of the Mossberg. She stepped inside and scanned the interior with the flashlight while Thor ran around checking every nook and cranny. There were no windows in the building, so the interior was lit only by the meager light that made it through the panes of the glass double doors.

Thor trotted back to her side after a minute, giving no indication they were anything but alone in the store. Emily leaned around the door and beckoned to Rhiannon to join her.

“Bring your flashlight,” she yelled to the girl as she exited the SUV.

Inside the store, row upon row of shelves were stacked with heavy-duty boots, camping equipment, dry goods, and fishing gear. Clothing racks held cold-weather jackets and trousers, thick wool sweaters, even thicker scarves, gloves, and balaclavas. Everything the modern outdoorsman would ever need to survive in this unforgiving climate and more.

Emily couldn’t see any carts, so, after a quick look around, she found a large gray plastic storage container. She discarded the lid and carried the container over to the racks of clothes.

Rhiannon had already found a parka with a fur-lined hood that she had zipped up so far her face was completely hidden.

“A big improvement,” said Emily, smiling.

They worked their way down each aisle, pulling what they needed from the racks, filling the plastic container to almost overflowing.

Near the camping equipment, Emily found a selection of heavy-duty sleeping bags. The tags attached to them said they were good down to minus thirty degrees. She added two of them to the container, the electric-pink one for Rhiannon.

Emily double-checked their loot one last time, running over the mental list she had made, making sure they had forgotten nothing.

Sure they had liberated everything on the list, Emily and Rhiannon each took one end of the box and readied themselves to carry it out to the idling SUV.

As they navigated carefully between the racks, Emily’s flashlight glinted off a glass display case that took up most of the right wall of the store.

“Hold on a second,” she said, lowering her end of the box to the ground. She walked over to the display case and played the light over the contents of the case, then along the back wall behind it.

“Excellent,” she called back to Rhiannon. “Guns. Lots of guns.”

The gun cases were all locked. Emily solved that particular problem with the butt of the Mossberg.

“Here, hold this,” she said as she handed Rhiannon her flashlight, the sound of the shattered glass still reverberating in their ears. “Keep it angled like this and be careful of the glass.” She used the butt of the shotgun to clear away the remaining broken shards of glass that still jutted from the surround of the case.

There was a selection of about twenty handguns to choose from. Each one had a small plaque beneath it that displayed the make and model. When Nathan had taught Emily how to shoot, she had used several handguns, but her favorite had been the Glock 19. It was light enough for her to handle easily and held fifteen rounds of nine-millimeter ammunition.

She searched the glass-strewn case until she spotted the model she was looking for. Emily carefully picked up the pistol, shook off a couple of pieces of broken glass, and gave it a quick once-over. The magazine was missing, but she’d probably find that in the plastic case that came with the weapon.

She was about to start looking for the Glock’s case when another pistol caught her eye. She picked up the little revolver and placed it next to the Glock on the counter behind the gun case.

She found both pistols’ protective cases in a drawer beneath the gun display. She added gun oil and a couple of cleaning kits and a shoulder rig for the Glock along with a leather belt holster for the little revolver. Adjacent to the display case were shelves of ammunition. She pulled several boxes of ammo for each of the guns and added them to the clothing and pistols, then went back and grabbed four boxes of shells for the shotgun.

It took two trips to carry their new “purchases” to the waiting vehicle. They hefted the overflowing container up into the cargo space of the Durango, sliding it in between the remainder of their food and Emily’s bike.

“Brrrrrrr!” Both girls were shivering as they climbed back into their seats, glad to be out of the biting cold. Emily cranked the heater back up.

In the thirty minutes or so their shopping trip had taken to complete, a layer of white fluffy snow had covered almost everything, completely transforming the image of the town from empty frontier to classic Christmas card. Emily was surprised at how comforting it was. With the layer of white covering everything, it was easy to think of each of these businesses and homes as containing families huddled around the fire, talking and laughing, safe and warm.

Emily glanced at the digital clock on the dashboard; it read 3:18. Still a couple of hours of light left but with the snow reducing visibility, it was probably better if they tried to find the university as quickly as possible.

Jacob had told Emily that it would be a mistake to try to make the final leg of the trip in the Durango. “It just won’t be capable of making it,” he had explained. “The engine isn’t designed to take the kind of gasoline you’ll need, and if it gets cold enough, it’ll freeze in the lines and you along with it.”

He had told her she needed to find his department at the university. “Look for the Geophysical Institute building. We have a couple of Sno-Cats that will be better suited to the terrain.”

When she had expressed her concern about how she was supposed to drive this new vehicle, Jacob had told her not to worry. “If you figured out how to drive the Durango, you shouldn’t have a problem.”

Emily wasn’t sure she agreed with him, but he had been right about most things so far.

“Okay, young lady, buckle up,” she said and carefully edged the SUV out onto the snow-covered road.

They spent the night on the second floor of the Geophysical Institute building, serenaded by a storm that, come morning, had added a fresh layer of snow several inches deep, completely covering the SUV they had left parked on the narrow road outside the building.

Jacob had told Emily that she would find the Sno-Cat in a storage facility on the north side of the Geo-Phys building, so, after breakfast—soup they found in the second-floor lounge—they threw on their cold-weather gear and headed out, descending down to ground level. Rhiannon found a fire escape that led them out to the rear of the building, but when Emily pushed down on the bar to open it, the door would not budge. She tried again, this time leaning her shoulder into it, and she felt the door give a little, then a little more as she bumped her shoulder hard against it.

Sunlight streamed in through the gap along with a large clump of snow that fell with a splat onto the floor.

Well, that explained the problem with opening the door. A drift of snow, at least four feet high, had piled against the outer door. She thumped the flat of her arm against the door, each time she hit it, the door budged a little bit more until there was just enough room for them to kick the snow away and squeeze through.

The early morning sun bounced painfully off the top layer of snow, blinding them both momentarily as they stepped from the darkness of the corridor into the open daylight.

Thor was off in a heartbeat, leaping like a fox through the snow that came up to his belly.

Emily, her hand pressed against her forehead to shade her eyes, scanned the field of white for any indication of the building that Jacob had talked about.

At the top of an embankment about three hundred feet or so away, past several mounds of snow that were probably buried cars, Emily saw a large building, its roof heavy with snow and its white sides blending almost seamlessly into the surrounding scenery.

Parked outside the entrance were several large dump trucks.

“I think that’s where we need to go,” she said to Rhiannon. The girl looked like an Eskimo bundled up in her thermal trousers and parka, her warm breath condensing in the frigid air like smoke from a baby dragon.

“’Kay.” Another puff of white filled the air.

The pair, flanked by Thor, trudged their way toward the building, the fresh powder crackling and crunching beneath their boots.

By the time they crested the embankment leading up to the building, Emily knew this had to be the right place. It was about the size of an aircraft hangar. They stood in front of two huge fold-back doors, both of which were closed and locked tight. A door on the left of the building opened when she twisted the knob, and they stepped into a small office area with a back wall made entirely of shatterproof glass that looked out into the darkness of the hangar’s interior space.

A set of filing cabinets and a small desk with a computer occupied most of the room. Fixed to the wall next to a second door leading out into the hangar was a corkboard with paper fliers and notices pinned to it. Beneath the corkboard was a metal frame from which hung several sets of keys.

There didn’t appear to be any windows in the main part of the building, and with the main doors closed, the interior beyond the office was dark as night. Emily hadn’t thought to bring the flashlight and didn’t much care to trudge all the way back through the snow to fetch it. If she had to, she would, but she decided to see if she could figure out a way to open the doors and let some light into the building first. Much like she had with the garage door back at the Jeffersons’ house, she surmised there had to be a way to manually open them.

She opened the second door leading into the main hangar and asked Rhiannon to stand in the doorway and keep it ajar for her. A thin pathway of light filtered out from the office. It wasn’t much, but it was at least enough for her to be able to make out the shape of the two main outer doors. Stepping into the larger space, she edged over to the double doors, pausing a minute as her eyes adjusted to the darkness.

Through the gloom Emily spotted a large metal handle protruding from a gray oblong box that came up to her waistline. It was secured to the floor by four bolts. A pulley system ran from the box and disappeared into the darkness high above her.

She took the handle firmly in both hands and rotated it once. The mechanism inside the box made a clacking sound as Emily turned the handle farther and the doors rattled like they’d been buffeted by a gust of wind. Two more turns of the handle and a laser-thin beam of light appeared at the center of the doors running from floor to ceiling. With each turn of the handle, the beam widened and grew, flooding the interior of the building with the sharp white light of the winter wonderland beyond its walls.

A few minutes later and both doors were fully opened. Emily dropped the hood on her parka, putting up with the sudden chill as the sweat on her forehead began to freeze.

“You all right?” asked Rhiannon.

“Fine,” Emily replied as she drew in deep icy breaths that stung her nose and throat. She beckoned the girl over to her side.

“Let’s find this thing and get out of here.”

Two rows of vehicles lined the interior of the storage building. A snowplow and a couple of trucks adapted to spread salt over icy roads waited off to her right. On the left was a second snowplow and, just beyond that, she saw a large bright-orange tracked vehicle that looked like it was designed for a science-fiction movie…or to traverse the snowy wastelands of this world, she thought. That could only be the Cat.

She walked over to the nearest side of the vehicle. It had four powerful-looking triangular tracks instead of wheels. Each was attached to a flat chassis on top of which sat a glass-encased four-door cab that contained two rows of seats. It looked like whoever had designed this machine had taken the cab from an eighteen-wheeler and dropped it onto a tank. In front of the cab was the squared-off engine compartment, and to the rear of the cab was a large silver tank that she assumed contained the fuel. Seven large windows in the cabin gave whoever was driving this thing a 360-degree field of vision.

An emblem etched on the engine compartment read TUCKER SNO-CAT.

“Wow,” said Rhiannon. “Are we going to be riding in that?”

It really was more like a tank than the SUV, Emily thought as she slowly circled the vehicle.

“Ohhh-kay!” she said aloud as she stood next to the giant machine. “How the hell am I supposed to drive this?”

First things first: she needed to find the keys.

While Rhiannon waited with Thor next to the Sno-Cat, Emily walked back to the office and the sets of keys she had seen dangling from beneath the corkboard. Each pair of keys was attached to a plastic tag indicating which vehicle it belonged with, and Emily quickly located one that had “Sno-Cat 1644” written across it in thick red marker.

Keys in hand, she headed back into the hangar.

The Cat’s triangular tracks were almost three feet at their highest vertices. To get into the vehicle’s cab, Emily needed to use them as a ladder to climb up to a flat aluminum access gantry running the length of the vehicle. Much like the Durango, the cab of the Sno-Cat had two sets of doors, the first accessed the front section, where the driver’s area and a single passenger seat were located. The second was for the passenger section of the cab. The cabin doors were locked, but the keys she had found slipped easily into the lock. She pulled the door open.

Inside the cab Emily was happily surprised at how similar the interior layout was to the Dodge. There was a regular steering wheel with a gearshift stick on one side of the column and one to control lights on the other. The dash had a similar cluster of indicators and dials she had become accustomed to driving the SUV. Even the seats looked comfortable and familiar. She’d been expecting something far more complicated, but the only unfamiliar thing she noticed was a bank of switches on the right side of the console. A quick inspection of these showed her they were most likely heating and exterior lighting controls. There was even a CD player, for crying out loud.

In the time it had taken to drive the Dodge Durango from Stuyvesant to Fairbanks, Emily had become quietly confident in her newfound skills as a driver, but she found herself feeling nervous as she settled her butt into the Cat’s driver’s seat. This thing was a hell of a lot bigger than the SUV, and like the tank it reminded Emily of, it looked more than capable of causing major damage to anything it hit…or ran over.

“Better if you stand out of the way,” she called down to Rhiannon. “And keep a tight hold of Thor.”

Rhiannon slipped her gloved fingers beneath the dog’s collar and guided him into the space between the snowplow and sander on the opposite side of the building.

“Hurry up,” she yelled back. “It’s freezing out here.”

Emily pulled the cabin door closed and looked over the controls. “Nothing to it,” she whispered as she slipped the keys into the ignition and turned them. The engine turned over once…twice…then caught, and the cabin filled with a deep rumbling as the engine sprang to life. A large puff of exhaust fumes coughed from the engine exhaust and a barely audible thrum vibrated through the cabin as the engine settled into its natural cadence. She checked the fuel gauge. It indicated the tank was almost full.

Slipping the gear stick into drive, she slowly pressed down on the accelerator. The engine revved, but the tracks of the Cat did not move an inch. What the? Glancing over at the console of lights and indicators, she saw a large button glowing red. Etched above it were the words PARKING BRAKE. She pressed it once, and the light went out.

She eased her foot back onto the accelerator. The Sno-Cat gave a slight shudder, and then it was moving, inching forward as its tracks rumbled across the concrete floor.

Emily whooped with joy as she guided the Cat toward the exit. She beckoned to Rhiannon to meet her outside the doors.

When she was clear of the hangar doors, Emily brought the Cat to a halt and pushed the gear stick back into the park position. With the engine still running, she climbed from the driver’s seat into the passenger seat. Opening the passenger door, she beckoned for Rhiannon to come around to her side of the vehicle as she stepped out onto the access gantry.

“You’re going to have to climb up the tracks. It’s easy. Don’t be afraid,” she said, yelling to be heard over the rumble of the engine.

The girl hesitated for a moment, then used the deep ridges of the track’s tread as finger- and toeholds and pulled herself up until Emily could reach down and take her hand. She pulled her the rest of the way. “Inside,” she yelled, pointing toward the passenger seat. Closing the door, Emily moved to the rear door and pulled it open. The door’s hinges were positioned so the door could be laid flush against the cab and not block the gantry access to the back part of the cabin.

Thor waited patiently at the foot of the Cat, his tail sweeping the dusty concrete floor. Kneeling down, at the far end of the gantry where he could see her, Emily called the dog to her.

He didn’t hesitate, leaping onto the rubber tracks and using his powerful hind legs to launch himself over the metal lip and onto the gantry next to Emily.

“Good boy,” she cooed and ushered the dog into the back compartment of the Cat. He climbed inside and sat facing the front windshield, panting quietly.

Emily climbed down the tracks and walked around to the driver’s side, then climbed back up again and retook her place in the driver’s seat, closing the door behind her.

“Wagons roll,” she called out as she slipped the Cat into gear and pulled out of the storage facility and onto the snow.

The Cat was incredibly easy to maneuver, nimbly moving over the snowy surface with no loss of grip; the four huge caterpillar tracks provided a surprising amount of stability and traction. It was a little bumpy in the cabin, but that was something they could put up with. The important thing was that they now had a vehicle that could travel safely over the roads and snowfields that Jacob had warned her were to come.

Before they could head out, they would need to head back to the Geo-Phys building and pack their supplies from the previous night. Then they would have to transfer as much of the supplies they still had in the back of the Dodge over to the Cat. It was going to be a tight squeeze in the backseat for Thor as there wasn’t a stowage compartment.

Rhiannon had slipped her parka’s hood from her head and sat with her arms braced against the console as she stared out the side window of the cab. She had seemed fascinated by the Sno-Cat’s tracks as they’d pulled the vehicle across the snow, leaving a trail of powder behind them like a jet’s vapor trail and a smile of joy on her face as the machine raced along the street.

Emily allowed her foot to become heavier against the gas pedal, pushing the Cat first up to twenty-five miles an hour, then, when she was confident of her ability to maintain control, up to thirty-five. Her nerves and the narrow streets of the campus quickly got the better of her, though, and she brought the machine back down to a more sensible twenty-ish as they cruised the street leading back to the Geo-Phys building. She spotted the snowy outline of the Dodge Durango halfway up the street and slid her new set of “wheels” to a stop alongside it.

Switching off the engine, Emily climbed out of the cab and leaped down onto the tracks, then the ground, closely followed by Rhia and Thor.

The Dodge was barely visible beneath the snowdrift that had all but covered it overnight. That was okay, though; they wouldn’t be needing it anymore.

“Race you upstairs,” Emily shouted. She was already running toward the door before her little companion could yell “Not fair” and chase after her to the accompaniment of Thor’s gleeful barks.

Twenty minutes later they were back at the SUV. Emily’s backpack was already in the backseat of the Cat, and Rhiannon was pushing the snow from the rear door of the Durango, trying to find the handle so she could open it. When it finally popped open, Emily made a quick assessment of everything they had. The food was not as important now that they were so near to their goal. Jacob had told them that he had months’ worth of provisions still, so they could leave some of it behind, as much as she hated to let good food go to waste. He had told her that the trip should take about two days to complete, so if she made sure they had enough food and water for five days, they should be golden. Besides, according to the atlas and Jacob’s instructions, there were a couple of small settlements they would need to stop at for fuel along the way. They could restock there if they needed to.

Their cold-weather clothing was the most important. They would be traveling several hundred miles farther north, and the weather would become even more unpredictable the closer they got to the Arctic coast. They transferred the remaining supplies across to the new vehicle’s backseat, making sure they left enough room so Thor could sit comfortably.

God, she hated to leave the bike behind, but where they were heading, there wasn’t going to be a need for it, and short of strapping it to the side of the Cat, nowhere to store it. She checked the panniers for anything that might be useful, but found only a gallon of water and a few cans of food.

It was going to have to stay with the SUV.

Emily helped Rhiannon climb back up onto the gantry, then returned to the SUV and clambered into the back, over the rear seats, grabbing the road atlas and a couple of energy bars stashed in the pocket of the passenger door.

After a final glance around, she dropped the keys onto the driver’s seat and climbed out, slamming the door closed behind her.

CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR

The James Dalton Highway was a four-hundred-mile stretch of road connecting Fairbanks to the town of Deadhorse, just a few miles shy of the Arctic Ocean. The twisting road covered some of the most extreme terrain and weather conditions in the world. Temperatures could drop to minus thirty degrees centigrade and storms could blow in seemingly out of nowhere, reducing visibility to nothing and freezing anything caught unprotected in the open.

“Thanks so much for that,” said Emily as she recalled the information Jacob had relayed to her.

“What?” asked Rhiannon, yawning and stretching as she woke from a two-hour nap.

“I said it looks like snow,” lied Emily.

Rhiannon gave her one of those withering looks that only an adolescent girl could deliver: a cross between utter disdain and pity. Emily smiled. Maybe it was better that the world’s supply of teenage boys was probably extinct. This one would do more than break hearts; she could turn them into mincemeat with a single glance.

“Go back to sleep,” Emily suggested.

Rhiannon shook her head and stretched. “Not tired,” she said. “How long have we been driving for?”

Emily glanced down at the display panel on the dash. A timer in the top corner of the screen showed they had been on the road for almost four hours now. She had kept the speed down to a manageable thirty miles per hour, occasionally even as low as fifteen when she had to navigate a particularly tricky corner. The tachometer said they had traveled a total of 107 miles. Just over a quarter of their trip was already behind them.

Rhiannon might not be tired, but Emily felt her own eyes beginning to ache. Even though the outside temperature was a frigid fifteen degrees, inside the cab, thanks to the superb heating system, the temperature was a balmy seventy-two degrees. Combine that with the sweeping sheets of white on every side and the occasional rhythmic beat of the industrial-size wiper-blades as they swished away the ice and snow that built up on the windshield, and you had as good a recipe for falling asleep at the wheel as was ever invented. If it wasn’t for her unease at driving this thing, she would have probably landed them in a snowbank or off the side of a mountain by now.

They had about another 150 miles of driving ahead of them before they reached the tiny encampment of Coldfoot. Jacob had assured her that they would find fuel and somewhere to spend the night there.

“It’s the only stop between Fairbanks at the southern end of the highway and Deadhorse, where you’re heading at the opposite end, that you’ll find fuel,” he had told her.

Ahead, the road curved up a steep slope that ran over and between a pair of hills before disappearing into a bank of fog or low clouds that obscured the top; it was hard to tell exactly which.

Emily slowed the Sno-Cat as they rumbled up the slope.

She had spent some time checking out the bank of switches and had identified what most of them did. As the white mist enveloped them, she switched on the powerful halogen lamps mounted on either side of the cab. The light helped a little, but it also gave the fog/cloud a weird orange glow that strained her eyes even more as the light bounced back at her.

Emily eased off the gas a little as the road rose higher into the hills, curving and dipping unexpectedly. Her heart was in her mouth for most of the next fifteen minutes as they climbed higher and higher; then suddenly they were out of it. Emily could see the road disappear again between two icy peaks about a mile farther up the road, so she picked up her speed a little, quickly chewing up the distance to the ridge.

She glanced over at Rhiannon, but the kid was curled up on the seat, her head resting against the passenger window, eyes closed as her chest rose and descended rhythmically. Asleep again.

The weather had been clear for most of the drive so far, except for the occasional squall that blew in seemingly from nowhere and disappeared just as quickly. Now as they crowned the valley between the peaks, looking down onto the plain below them, she could see for miles ahead of her. It was breathtakingly beautiful. An unspoiled white canvas. In the distance, mountains rose into the air, crowned by thick waves of cloud, their dark outline providing an elegant border to the sheer simplicity of nature’s perfection.

Emily guided the Cat down the opposite side of the hill’s winding road, the same band of fog/clouds blanketed the descent for several miles ahead, completely obscuring the road from view. Emily switched the lamps back on as they penetrated the mist and slowed the Cat to a more manageable speed, edging it around a hairpin bend that dropped rapidly and then curved again in the opposite direction.

If Emily had taken her eyes off the road for even a second she would not have seen the eighteen-wheeler splayed across the road. When it materialized from out of the bank of fog there was less than ten feet left between the Cat and it. Emily slammed her foot against the brake pedal. The tracks instantly locked, bringing the machine to an almost immediate stop as its treads dug into the snow. Rhiannon tumbled off the seat with a cry of fear, hitting the console and falling in a pile of waving arms and legs to the floor.

“What was that? What was that?” she demanded as she pulled herself back into the seat. She screamed again when she saw the huge glinting curve of the tanker just feet from the front of the Cat’s engine.

“Where did that come from?” she demanded.

“I have no idea,” answered Emily. “Are you okay?”

Rhiannon, pouting just a little at the embarrassment of the spill, nodded that she thought she was. The only thing bruised was her dignity.

The lamps cut through the space between the Cat and the tanker, and Emily grabbed the handle of the one on her side of the cab, panning the light through the mist along the length of the other vehicle. The driver’s cabin of the truck hung over the right edge of the road, its back wheels the only thing keeping it from falling into the space beyond, snapping the cab from the trailer like a broken neck. The rest of the truck, a huge cylinder trailer of brushed silver, cut diagonally across the road, blocking most of the path.

Emily panned the light left, then back to the right again, but even the powerful beam of the spotlight could not penetrate very deeply into the bank of mist. There was nothing else for it; she was going to have to get out and see what kind of room there was for her to maneuver.

Shit! If this tanker blocked the entire road, they were screwed. They would have to head back to Fairbanks and figure out some other way to get to Jacob’s location.

“Stay here,” she said to Rhiannon. “And lock the door behind me.” Emily saw the look of fear spread over the young girl’s face at the thought of being left alone. “Don’t worry,” she told her. “I just need to look around. Besides, Thor will keep you company. Won’t you, boy?” Thor laid his muzzle on the center console between the two front seats and whined quietly, his tail beating a subdued rhythm against the upholstery.

“I’ll be right back,” she continued as she manipulated the floodlight until it illuminated the majority of the length of the trailer. It would give her some light at least.

She pulled on her parka and zipped it up tight before slipping the hood over her head. The shotgun was hard to handle with the thick gloves, but she took it anyway. Emily opened the door quickly and stepped outside before the heat of the cabin could escape. Slamming it shut, she saw white condensation begin to collect on the window. She tapped the glass and mouthed “Lock. The. Door” to the wide-eyed Rhiannon. She waited until she saw her reach across and click the lock into place, then turned and maneuvered carefully along the ice-covered access gantry, stepped down onto the front track, and hopped the last few feet down onto the snow-covered road. The snow was less than a foot deep here, she noted, as her boots sank down into it with a crunch like dry autumn leaves.

Through the narrow vision of the hood of her parka, Emily could make out the cold steel of the tanker ahead of her. She crunched over to it and leaned a gloved hand against it as she oriented herself with the light from the Cat. Even through the thick pads of her glove, she could feel the cold of the frigid metal permeating to the tips of her fingers.

The mist reduced visibility down to about fifteen feet; her own breath added to it as it swirled around her. She moved as close as she dared to the cab. The rock-strewn curb leading over the edge had no guardrail to protect drivers from the plunge to the valley below. It was probably best to stay back from the edge—the lip of the road looked loose and crumbly. No point putting herself in danger; besides, the driver’s cabin was too far over for her to reach, anyway.

Doubling back, Emily followed the trailer toward its rear, walking carefully alongside it. Ten steps beyond that and the truck had completely disappeared from view. The panic that flooded her system was almost paralyzing. Getting lost out there, with no visual cues to orient herself by, could be deadly. Panicking, on the other hand, would be disastrous.

Breathe, she told herself. Just breathe.

She looked down at the snow; the outline of her tracks, crisp and fresh, were easily visible. Unless it started snowing again, they would act as bread crumbs. All she would need to do was follow them back to the Cat.

She started walking again, measuring each step as she watched for some indication of the end of the road. Five more steps and she could just begin to make out a dim form through the mist; another step and the edge of the road materialized, flanked by an embankment that rose up above her before disappearing into the mist. The embankment, an almost sheer face of rock, was too steep for even the multitracked Cat to climb, but she was pretty sure that if she was careful, she could slip the Cat through the space between it and the back end of the tanker. The Cat was about nine feet wide, and she had marked off about sixteen feet from the end of the tanker to the embankment. If she took it slow, they would be okay.

Emily turned to retrace her steps back to the vehicle as a gust of wind swept down from farther up the hill, buffeting and jostling her as she followed her footprints back the way she had come. A sudden, powerful crosswind pummeled her back, sending a flurry of blinding snow into the air. Off balance and disoriented by the sudden pounding wind, Emily fell forward, arms windmilling and then disappearing into the snow up to her elbows. The wind continued to buffet her even as she tried to struggle back to her feet. Every time she managed to raise herself to her knees, another gust of wind would knock her down again. It was futile to try and fight against it, she realized after her third attempt. Instead, she sank back to the ground and pulled her legs up to her chest, dipping her head down to her knees to limit the amount of cold air that could be blown into the hood of the parka. She’d just have to wait until the wind died down rather than risk being blown over the edge of the road.

Seconds dragged into minutes as she was rocked back and forth; clumps of snow lifted from the embankment face, bouncing off the protective coating of the jacket. In the darkness of her hood, the wind sounded like a wolf, baying for her blood.

Slowly, the wind began to die away. When she was quite sure it had stopped, she slowly lifted her head from her knees and looked around. The mist had disappeared, too, dragged away by the wind and revealing the rest of the road as it wound down the hill.

“Oh, shit!” The expletive tumbled from her mouth as she struggled to her feet and pulled the hood from her sweat-soaked head, oblivious to the chill.

Stretching out below her, lining almost every foot of the road, was a procession of frozen vehicles winding the remaining two miles to the bottom of the hill.

To Emily, as she gazed out over the line of trucks, flatbeds, snowplows, tankers, Sno-Cats, and even a snowmobile or two, it seemed as though she had stumbled across some long-lost convoy.

It looked like they had been moving in formation together. Maybe they had been evacuating from the oil fields of Prudhoe Bay when the red rain caught them out in the open? The majority of the dead vehicles consisted of either heavy-goods or commercial-size transportation, suggesting they must have come from one of the support sites that supplied materials and assistance to the oil rigs that plundered the Arctic. Maybe these were even from Deadhorse?

Her own Cat was just fifty feet away, its engine billowing plumes of exhaust into the air. She could see Rhiannon, her nose pressed against the glass of the cab, staring at her and then at the snaking trail of frozen metal glinting in the sunlight.

Emily motioned to her that she was okay—not so easy to do when your hands are hidden in gloves. But she was a smart kid; she could figure out that she was all right.

The jackknifed big rig that had caused them to stop was the lead vehicle of the convoy. Behind that was another rig, which had come to a stop about ten feet or so from its rear end. The second vehicle’s flatbed was empty, but when Emily climbed up onto the cab’s footplate and wiped away the snow from the passenger window, she could see the cabin was not.

“Jesus!” Emily exclaimed.

Where she had expected to find the frozen body of the rig’s driver, she instead found an alien pupa. It was stretched across both the driver’s and passenger’s seats, and a light sheen of frost covered the outside of the dark-red shell. It was at least twice as big as the pupae she had seen in her newspaper’s offices back in Manhattan, and Emily wondered just how many people had been crammed into this cabin when the red rain had claimed them.

She dropped to the snow and moved to the next truck. There were two more pupae inside. Each resting on the seat where the human host had died.

It was the same for the next ten vehicles she checked. Every seat filled. Everyone inside dead.

But some of the convoy’s refugees, either trying to escape or maybe stepping outside to see why the convoy had stopped, had not been changed. They lay frozen on the ground, their still-human outlines barely visible beneath the layer of snow that had settled over them, a shroud of pure white. Some had not managed to make it any farther than their open doors and now lay face-down in the snow, their torsos covered by a white veil while their bottom halves remained inside their vehicles.

That was strange. It was as though the extra insulation provided by the closed-off vehicles had allowed the transmutation to progress to its later stages, while for those who made it outside, the lower temperature had arrested the development into the alien pupa form.

It was only after Emily wiped a sheen of sweat from her forehead that she realized how warm it had become. She exhaled heavily. There was no white fog of breath. In fact, she could feel the air warming around her, tingling against her ears and her cheeks.

How could that be?

A minute or so later, as she checked for a clear route between a tanker and what looked to be a decommissioned school bus, she had to unzip her parka. The temperature must have risen at least three degrees in that time. She could feel a warm breeze blowing against her face and hands, like a car heater turned to low. It was sweeping down from the mountainside above her, and, as she looked up the mountain toward the peak, she could see rivulets of water beginning to run down the mountain as the snow began to melt.

She glanced around her at the maze of metal. It was thawing down here, too. The windshield of the school bus that had just a minute ago been covered in a crispy frost was now completely clear, exposing the dim outline of another pupa in the driver’s seat. A continual drip, drip, drip of melting ice water ran off the hood.

Emily headed back to the waiting Cat.

There was a sudden loud crack like split wood off to her left.

She started at the noise. It had come from the inside of a Toyota SUV, stopped near the edge of the mountain pass. She paused, listening, then when the noise did not come again, crunched over to the Toyota. A large chunk of snow and ice that had collected on the roof slid off and fell to the ground as she approached.

Leaning in, Emily used the arm of her parka to wipe away the sheen of condensation that had collected on the passenger side window.

There was another pupa inside, but this one was open. A long fissure ran down the center of the shell; there was an inch of space between each side. As she watched, a set of spindly black legs, each with a sharp claw at its tip, rose slowly from the darkness of the pupa’s interior, grasped each side of the shell, and pushed them wider apart.

Emily took an involuntary step back. “You have got to be kidding me!” The pupae were still alive? They should be frozen solid.

She glanced back at the row of stalled vehicles. There could be hundreds of aliens gestating inside them, for all she knew, heated by the warm thermals sweeping down off the mountaintop.

“Great. Just freaking great,” she spat as she began to make her way back to the Cat as quickly as she could. The top layer of snow was rapidly turning to slush beneath her feet. An occasional spindrift of white still leaped into the air, lifted by the warming breeze.

From all around her now, the cracks of splitting pupae began to resonate, bouncing off the sheer walls of the winding mountain road.

There was still sixty feet left between her and the Cat when Emily heard what sounded like a squadron of mosquitoes buzz into life. She glanced back in the direction of the metal graveyard. A blur of movement behind the windshield of the nearest big rig drew her eyes to it. There was a whirring motion, like a propeller of an airplane, then a screeching sound that was quickly followed by an almost perfect circle appearing against the windshield of the truck. Glass powder began to fly away from the windshield as the alien caught inside began to use its specialized mandibles to cut a way out.

Then the glass circle fell off, and Emily began to run.

She passed the first jackknifed truck just as the alien inside was squeezing through the hole it had made in the passenger side window. Emily could see its black claws pushing through the opening as it pulled itself out onto the hood of the truck.

Rhiannon’s shocked face, her eyes wide, mouth agape, pressed against the window of the Cat, staring at the alien as it emerged from the frozen tomb. At her side, Thor barked silently through the reinforced windshield.

The snow had become slippery, almost like mud now, and it sucked at her feet, slowing her pace. She was almost at the Cat’s front set of tracks when the newborn alien launched itself into the air toward her from the side of the cab that still hung precariously over the precipice.

Emily let out a gasp as it landed on the lip of the road just a few feet from her, its two front claws furiously trying to find purchase on the slippery surface, while its back legs scrambled against empty air. It managed to hang there for a few seconds then, just as Emily clambered up onto the gantry of the Cat, she saw the creature lose its fight and disappear silently over the edge.

Emily pulled at the door, but it was still locked. She hammered furiously on the window until Rhiannon, still shocked at what she had just seen, reached across and flipped the lock. Emily pulled the door open and jumped inside, locking the door again behind her.

“What is that?” Rhiannon demanded.

Emily ignored the girl. As she repositioned herself into the driver’s seat, she looked up at the convoy just in time to see the first wave of twenty or more spider-aliens begin to collect on the flat top of the lead big rig.

“Emily? What are they?” Rhiannon yelled again, almost in tears now.

“They’re aliens, Rhiannon. And we have to get out of here, right now.”

But where was she supposed to go? She couldn’t go back, there was no other way across these mountains than the road they were on. They were still far too high up to try a direct descent over the side of the mountain; it was virtually a sheer drop all the way to the bottom at this point. There was only one way: forward, through the maze of stalled and wrecked vehicles.

More of the creatures had collected on the roof of the first rig, milling around aimlessly, scuttling back and forth as if looking for some way off the mountain.

Emily revved the engine and moved toward the space at the back of the first rig, keeping the Cat moving as fast as she safely could. She edged around the back of the first trailer and aimed toward the second larger gap.

As she passed the end of the trailer, something heavy hit the top of the Cat’s roof.

Rhiannon squealed as first one, then a stream of the spider-aliens landed on the roof and then jumped down to the snow beside them. A constant stream of the creatures poured off Emily’s side, hitting the snow, rolling, and righting themselves, then leaping and jumping as they hit the snow. It was almost as though the snow was burning them. Some of the creatures took off toward the nearest vehicle; others bounced like scalded cats until they either stopped moving or disappeared off the lip of the road.

As Emily finally cleared the first truck, the flow of aliens stopped, but not before one final creature launched itself off the top of the truck. It hit hard on the roof and bounced down onto the extended hood of the cab. It scrabbled around and clacked toward Emily and a screaming Rhiannon, smacking against the reinforced windshield. It clung there for a moment, each of its two eyestalks focusing on one of the humans inside the cab.

Thor’s head appeared between the two seats, drool flying from his mouth as he snarled and barked at the unwanted hitchhiker.

The malamute’s barking only grew more manic as the alien’s bulbous black head reared back and the two cutting appendages that passed for jaws suddenly began to spin furiously. In seconds they were nothing but a blur of motion. The creature’s head dropped forward and connected with the windshield. Instantly the inside of the cabin was filled with a high-pitch whine, worse than a hundred sets of fingernails on a blackboard. A plume of pulverized glass flew from the junction of windshield and alien.

Emily’s vision, already half-obstructed by the creature’s huge corkscrew-like body, was blocked completely, her senses overwhelmed by the piercing screech of pulverizing glass.

She hit the brake rather than risk a collision.

A second later and a circle of glass fell away, crashing onto the dashboard. The reinforced glass of the windshield refused to shatter and fell to the floor. The creature eased its head through the newly opened space, swiveling back and forth as if surveying the cab’s interior. Its matte-black skin seemed to brighten as it touched the much warmer air of the Cat’s cabin.

Rhiannon was screaming over and over, “Emily! Kill it. Kill it.”

Thor was still trying, unsuccessfully, thank God, to push his way between the seats and reach the creature, which was already forcing itself through the portal it had created. Rhiannon had shrunk as far back into her seat as she could, trying to remain out of its reach.

“Thor. Get back,” Emily screamed as she twisted around and pushed herself between the dog and the seats, reaching for the shotgun. “Get back, Thor,” she yelled again when the dog continued to try to move forward. The dog finally acceded and wriggled free of the space. It was all the room Emily needed, and her fingers found the strap of the shotgun.

She pulled the Mossberg toward her, grabbing it with both hands. Swinging around, she brought the gun down to her side, aiming the barrel at the creature’s head.

It was halfway through the hole now, its eyestalks swiveling back and forth. Emily paused, her finger on the trigger. If she fired the gun in here, there was no telling what kind of damage the buckshot might do. It could ricochet around the cabin and maim her, Rhiannon, or Thor. The blast would surely kill the creature, but this close it meant an added danger from flying alien carcass. She couldn’t risk it.

Emily flipped the shotgun around and hit the creature between its two eyestalks with the butt of the shotgun.

The eyestalks shrunk back, and the thing’s buzz-saw jaws flew wide apart. It was, Emily supposed, the closest the alien could come to expressing surprise. But it didn’t back away, so she hit it again, this time aiming for the top eyestalk. It exploded into a mess of black goo.

That seemed to get the message across that it was not welcome, and the thing rapidly pulled back through the hole, skittering off the hood of the Sno-Cat.

With the alien gone, the cabin was now replaced with the rumble of the idling engine flowing in through the hole in the windshield. She was going to have to figure out some way to fix that.

“It’s the warmth of the cabin,” Emily said with sudden realization, more to herself than Rhiannon. “These things are surrounded by snow and ice. They must be extremely sensitive to changes in temperature. That makes the inside of this cabin the fucking Ritz-Carlton for them.”

Whatever weird weather anomaly had caused the sudden warming of the air outside had increased the ambient temperature on this side of the mountain enough to thaw the creatures out. Now they were instinctively looking for a way off the mountain. That meant Jacob’s observation was only half-right. The cold only stopped the effects of the red rain. It was going to take prolonged exposure to frigid weather to have the same effect on the creatures as she had seen with the aliens at the playground, back in Fairbanks.

The thought had no sooner entered her mind than Rhiannon screamed a warning, “Look!”

Emily followed the girl’s eyes. “Oh! Shit!” she hissed from lips that suddenly felt dry and cracked. Clambering over the sides of the big rig in front of them was another wave of spider-aliens. They leaped from the side of the rig, making a beeline for the stationary Cat, attracted by the plume of escaping warm air of the cabin.

Emily floored the accelerator, sending a spray of melting snow up from the tracks as the Cat began picking up speed. There were at least sixty of the little bastards heading toward them, Emily estimated. There was no turning back now, though; she had to keep plowing forward. Aiming the front of the Cat toward a space between the next two vehicles, Emily pushed the speed up to thirty-five.

“Hold on,” she yelled at Rhiannon over the roaring engine just before the Cat hit the leading edge of the onrushing aliens.

There were several resounding thuds as the machine met the monsters. The thuds were quickly followed by a series of satisfying pops and crunches as the tracks of the Cat crushed the carapaces of the first few unlucky creatures.

More tried to leap onto the Cat as it rolled over them, but they either bounced harmlessly off the sides or were caught by the four tracks and crushed to a purple pulp. One did manage to land on the gantry running alongside Emily, but it skidded and slipped along the metal surface, unable to find purchase, before sliding off the opposite end.

And then they were through the creatures. Emily gunned the engine, pushing the Cat up to forty in an attempt to leave the creatures behind. She gained some distance, but the things were persistent little buggers; she could see them streaming down the hill behind her even as the gap between them widened.

There was enough space between the next few vehicles that Emily didn’t need to slow down, and the distance between them and their pursuers grew even greater. One hundred, then two hundred, then three hundred feet separated them. But as she slowed the Cat to maneuver around a blind hairpin corner, she was forced to slam on the brakes again.

A truck, towing a thirty-foot flatbed, had come to a halt right at the apex of the turn; its cab took up the entirety of the center portion of the snow-covered road, leaving less than ten feet of space separating it from the right edge. Beyond the edge, an almost sheer drop fell the final sixty feet or so to the plain below.

Emily stared back through the rear window toward the summit. The creatures were still doggedly following her, swarming down the mountainside.

There was no time to lose. She had to risk it.

Emily reversed the Cat back until she was as close to the edge as she dared.

“Rhiannon, I need you to be my eyes,” Emily said, trying to keep the panic she felt from her voice. “Look out the window on your side and tell me how much space there is between us and the edge, all right?” Rhiannon stared blankly at Emily for a second, then nodded and scooted over a little until she was pressed tightly against the door.

“How much, honey? Quickly.” Emily could see the wave of creatures closing in on them in the side-view mirror.

Rhiannon turned and held her two hands up in the air to illustrate the distance. “This much,” she said. About ten inches. That gave Emily a little more room to edge over, just a couple of inches but no more. Rhiannon’s face was almost as white as the snow, and Emily could see a vein twitching convulsively in her throat.

As she edged the Cat closer to the lip of the road, Rhiannon reduced the gap between her hands accordingly. “We’re getting awfully close,” she gulped, glancing down at the drop just inches away from her side of the Cat.

Emily reassessed her angle of approach to the space between the stalled truck and the lip of the road. This was the best she could do without risking one of the tracks slipping off the edge. She wiped away a bead of sweat that had trickled into her left eye, then allowed her foot to caress the accelerator.

Gently, gently does it.

The Cat moved slowly forward, inching its way toward the gap.

The cab of the wrecked big rig loomed large on Emily’s left side as she eased the Cat gradually past it, the left rearview mirror scraping noisily against the front edge of the truck’s engine cowling. Emily ignored the screeching of metal against metal, focusing entirely on keeping the vehicle as far to the left as was possible.

The front two tracks of the Cat were clear of the cab now, safely on solid ground but with less than two feet of space left between the front of the vehicle and the curving edge of the road. She brought the Cat to a dead stop and turned the wheel as far to the left as she could until she could see the tips of the left track poking out from beneath the gantry. She eased the vehicle forward, ignoring the gasp from Rhiannon as the kid surely saw how close the back of the Cat was to the edge. Pushing down on the accelerator, Emily glanced at the mirror on the right side of the cab; she could see the back right track was hanging over the precipice, spinning in midair above the drop-off.

And then the creatures hit the almost stationary Cat like a tsunami, and Emily felt the vehicle slide farther sideways on the slushy ground. She couldn’t see a thing now as the creatures hammered into the vehicle, fighting each other to get to the already open hole in the windshield.

Emily cursed and pushed harder on the accelerator, but it was useless. She couldn’t see a thing, and, as more of the creatures joined those already jostling for position, she felt their added weight finally prove too much and gravity take hold.

Emily instinctively threw an arm out across Rhiannon’s chest as she felt the front of the Cat begin to slowly tip skyward.

They balanced for a second on the lip of the cliff, and Emily thought that maybe, just maybe, the tracks would find some traction, but that thought quickly disappeared as she felt the Cat begin to slide over the edge. And then it was all too late.

It was over in a matter of seconds. But it felt like minutes.

Inside the Cat the cabin was dark, every inch of the exterior covered in the crawling horrors. That was probably a godsend. It meant Rhiannon wouldn’t see the fall. But that didn’t stop the girl from screaming as the massive vehicle began to pick up speed, sliding backward down the cliff toward the valley floor below.

Emily felt the Cat begin to turn, the weight of the engine compartment dragging the front of the vehicle sideways, and for a moment she thought they were going to tip over and roll the remainder of the way. But the big vehicle remained upright as, now facing forward, they continued their slide.

One by one, the spider-aliens either leaped clear or were thrown from the Cat as it bounced and slid over the escarpment. Emily saw flailing forms of aliens bouncing past her, followed by an avalanche of snow and other debris.

The Cat hit something hard, maybe an outcrop of rock, and the right side lifted off the ground, dislodging more of the aliens into the air. The tracks came down again with a ringing of strained suspension springs that jarred the occupants and snapped Emily’s teeth together painfully.

A rush of cold and snow entered through the windshield, filling the cabin with freezing air.

Emily had a clear view of the onrushing valley at the base of the escarpment as they hurtled toward it. Glancing over at Rhiannon, Emily could see the girl was pushed back into the support of her chair, her eyes pinched shut in terror.

“Hold on. It’s almost over,” she tried to say, but the words were lost in the rumble of the Cat’s headlong fall.

Then came a bone-jarring shudder as the Cat thudded deep into a snowbank at the base of the cliff, sending a cascade of white powder high into the air. The Cat rocked three times as it settled back on its four creaking tracks.

All was silent.

“Are you okay?” Emily asked Rhiannon as she tried to unlatch the girl’s safety harness.

Rhiannon opened her eyes and gave a weak smile, accompanied by two thumbs up.

Thor peeked his head back through the gap between Emily and Rhiannon, whining quietly. He was fine, apparently.

The Mossberg lay at Emily’s feet. She picked it up and cradled it to her as she looked around the exterior of the cabin. The front of the Cat was buried almost up to the windshield in the snowbank that had finally brought them to a stop. But to the left and right of her, she could see an occasional broken limb sticking up from beneath the snow or the shattered carapace of an alien.

The only sound was their breathing. That meant the engine was dead. If it wouldn’t start, then they would be as good as dead themselves out there. The temperature could drop to minus thirty in a heartbeat. There was no way they could survive and no hope of rescue.

Emily said a silent prayer to whatever gods might be looking over them and turned the ignition key. The engine fired up instantly, and Emily raised her eyes skyward in an equally silent thank-you.

She moved the gear stick into reverse and began to edge the Cat out of the wall of snow.

They had landed at the base of the ravine. On the right was a wall of rock that might just as well have been Everest; on the left was the final curve of the road. Beyond that was the open plain of snow that would lead them to their next destination.

Emily accelerated the Cat slowly, listening for any noises that might indicate a problem with the engine or a broken track. The only sound was the roar of the engine and the whistle of wind through the hole in the windshield.

“We’ll have to do something about that,” she said to Rhiannon, nodding toward the hole. “Or we’re going to freeze to death in here.” There was no way even the powerful heater could keep up with the freezing air that was rushing in.

They had lost the left mirror on the driver’s side during the fall, and one of the supply boxes had broken open and spilled its contents over the back row of seats.

They left the ravine behind them, zagged left a few hundred feet across a field of white that seemed to stretch out to eternity, and then bumped up onto the road.

Emily put another five miles behind them before she finally felt safe enough to stop the Cat and jury-rig a repair for the gaping hole. She emptied the remaining cans of food from the spilled cardboard box, then pulled it apart at the seams, taping the cardboard to the windshield with medical tape from the first aid kit.

“It ain’t pretty, but it’ll have to do,” she said to Rhiannon, staring at the repair.

With nothing but clear road ahead of them now, the Cat picked up speed and roared down the road toward Coldfoot.

CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE

The place looked like a cross between an Old West town from some black-and-white fifties cowboy movie and a POW camp.

“Welcome to Coldfoot,” a sign had proclaimed. And you’re welcome to it, Emily thought as she steered the Cat into the center of the encampment.

To the south were rows of single-wide billets that Emily assumed must be the “hotel” accommodation a sign a few miles outside of town had hinted at. All she really cared about was following the hand-painted hardwood signs to the gas station.

In front of the farthest wooden building, Emily saw the familiar shape of two gas pumps, conspicuous by their brushed metal bodies and bright-blue tops. Adjacent to the pumps was a chain-linked area, and secured behind the fence were several huge metal cylinders that Emily guessed was where the gasoline for the pumps and heating fuel for the buildings was stored.

It seemed logical to Emily that the farther north they traveled, the less effect the red rain might have had on the people crazy enough to want to live in this godforsaken land, especially after what they had witnessed back on the mountain. That could mean the chances of there being more human survivors rose accordingly, and Emily was well beyond trusting anyone she didn’t know at this point.

Emily pulled the Cat to a standstill beside the first gas pump.

The day still had a few hours’ worth of daylight left in it, if you could call the weak gray luminescence struggling to make it through the thick layer of nimbostratus cloud light. The utter solitude of this place would drive me crazy within a week, she thought as she left the Cat idling and leaped down to the snow-packed ground. That solitude, such a contrast to her beloved New York, bothered her more now than the aliens. She had already proven she could deal with the invaders. The loneness and solitude of this barren place? That was a whole other matter.

The Cat had a one-hundred-gallon-capacity gas tank, situated outside the cab, behind the rear seats. There was still just under a quarter of a tank left, and they were already a little over halfway to their destination. So a full tank should be more than enough to get them to Deadhorse, barring any more unforeseen excursions.

The two gas pumps were both unlocked, but without any electricity to power them, it made no difference. Emily pulled the lever on the diesel dispenser anyway; it clicked uselessly. When Emily had needed fuel for the Durango, she had simply siphoned it from abandoned vehicles along the route using the hand pump, negating the need to figure out how to access storage tanks at gas stations. But the Cat required a very specific type of treated diesel that could withstand the subfreezing temperatures. And Emily had no idea whether that was something she could just pull from another truck and no way to tell what was in the tank of the vehicle, anyway.

But now she was going to have to work out some way to get the gas from either the pumps or from the large storage containers behind the fenced-off area…assuming that was what they were. If she was wrong and the gas tanks were buried in the frozen ground like a regular gas station, then they were screwed, because she had no idea how she would be able to locate the access port for the ground tank beneath two feet of snow.

Emily crunched through the snow to the fence; there was a padlocked gate at front. She tugged the padlock, hoping it might have been left unlocked, but was rewarded with only a shower of snow falling from the chain-link fence.

She could just make out some kind of nozzle-like protrusion on the one tank closest to her, but she couldn’t be sure how useful it would be to her unless she could get in there and inspect it. The key for the lock could be anywhere and was probably hidden away somewhere safe. She would have to find something to cut this lock.

Of the three buildings she could see, the large battleship-gray prefabricated Quonset hut looked the most likely to have what she was looking for.

“Coming?” Emily called to Rhiannon as she walked back to the Cat, but the girl shook her head slowly from behind the cabin’s glass. Sure, her look said, I’ll leave this nice warm vehicle to come trek through the snow with you…not!

“Smart girl,” Emily said and continued crunching through the snow to the building.

It was some kind of workshop, she thought, or maybe a mechanics shop? There were a couple of pieces of huge yellow earthmoving machinery, a backhoe, and some kind of excavator stored inside. They loomed out of the darkness like flash-frozen monsters. On one side of the building were three walled-off bays, each lined with workbenches and an assortment of tools and bits and pieces of mechanical doohickeys. Peg-Boards on the wall of each bay held wrenches and screwdrivers and other hand tools.

Even deserted and frozen, the place still smelled of grease and sweat, almost normal. But after the encounter on the mountain, she was not going to rush in unprepared. That little excursion had proven that the red rain was far more resilient than any of them had given it credit for. She kept the shotgun tucked under her arm, just in case of any more close encounters of the holy-fuck kind.

Emily shone her flashlight over the benches, searching for anything that looked like it would be a match for the large padlock on the gate.

“Bingo,” she said as she stepped into the third bay, her light falling on a large red bolt cutter resting against the far wall near a stack of oil drums. The frozen steel tool was like picking up an icicle; she could feel the cold seeping through the thick padding of her gloves. She had to move it from one hand to the other periodically so her hand didn’t freeze up.

She was heading back to the exit when she spotted a pile of wooden sheets, offcuts from some project, slotted in between two workbenches. Emily looked through them until she found a thin piece she approximated would fit over the hole the alien had left in the Cat’s windshield. She would have preferred something transparent, but beggars could not be choosers these days. A few more minutes of rummaging around the work area turned up a roll of gray industrial-strength tape.

Emily followed her own footprints back to the fuel storage area, raising the bolt cutter in mock salute as she passed the idling Cat.

Rhiannon looked unimpressed.

Placing the open jaws of the cutter over the shackle of the lock, Emily squeezed as hard as she could on the long handles of the cutter. The lock slipped from between the jaws before she could apply enough pressure; the chain snapped it back against the gate.

It was going to take a little more finesse than brawn, she thought. She repositioned the cutter’s jaws against the lock, this time leaning in slightly, pushing the lock back against the chain link of the gate, using it for leverage. She applied pressure gradually, feeling her muscles tense across her shoulders until the hardened jaws finally severed the shackle with a sharp metallic snap. She dropped the cutters into the snow beside her and wiggled the lock until it came free of the chain, which she pulled through the gate and dumped next to the cutters.

The base of the gate was covered in snow, and it took her several minutes of pushing and pulling until she was able to force it wide enough that she could slip through into the storage area.

Emily moved quickly to the first tank. Stenciled on the side in large black characters were a bunch of symbols and numbers. Next to them was the word UNLEADED.

Okay, that wasn’t what she wanted. She moved to the next tank; this one was upright instead of horizontal like the first one. A similar set of black characters had been painted on this one, although the numbers were different. Beneath them was the magic word: DIESEL.

A pipe, about twice as thick as her arm, led from the opposite side of the tank, then made an abrupt right-angle turn and dropped down, disappearing into the snow and, presumably, into the ground, where it would run to the pumps beyond the fence line. Beneath that pipe was a second, smaller pipe that looked more like a water spigot but twice as large. A big metal lever was fixed to the side of the outlet. EMERGENCY SIPHON PORT was stenciled in the same black letters where the smaller pipe met the tank.

She grasped the lever with both hands and pulled. A spurt of noxious-smelling diesel fuel cascaded from the mouth of the port, staining the snow brown. Jesus, it smelled bad. Emily forced the lever back into place, cutting off the flow. Well at least she knew it worked.

The space between the two storage tanks was far too narrow for Emily to have any hope of safely negotiating in the Cat, so she was going to have to transfer the fuel by hand, she supposed.

How, though? She had left the five-gallon gas can back in Fairbanks when they’d abandoned the Durango. She still had the siphon, but that would be useless for this job.

She’d seen a couple of large metal gas cans on the shelf of one of the bays in the Quonset hut where she had found the bolt cutter, and she headed back to the building, quickly located what she was looking for, and carried it back to the Cat. It was smaller than the large plastic can she had used to siphon fuel for the SUV, probably three gallons, she guessed, but that was good, because it meant she could enlist Rhia to help her.

Rhiannon had fallen asleep in the warm cabin of the Cat, and Emily had to nudge her to wake her.

“I need your help,” Emily said as she slipped into the driver’s seat, revved the engine, and maneuvered the Cat as close to the chain-link gate as she safely could.

“Put on your gloves—it’s cold out there.”

Emily had Rhiannon positioned on the back of the Cat, its engine turned off now, as she passed the gas can to the girl to pour into the open mouth of the vehicle’s fuel tank.

The stink from the diesel was terrible, and Emily had taken her scarf and wrapped it around her nose and mouth to make sure she didn’t pass out from the fumes as she filled the three-gallon container. That didn’t stop the fumes from reaching her eyes, though, and she found herself having to fight rubbing them each time she pulled the handle on the tank’s port.

After twenty or so trips back and forth between the Cat and the tank, Emily could feel her back and shoulder muscles begin to complain. They’d managed to transfer about sixty gallons, by her estimation, and when she counted the quarter tank left in the tank, that meant there was only another five trips left before they should be done.

“My feet are cold,” moaned Rhiannon, shuffling from side to side to illustrate her displeasure.

“Mine, too,” Emily shouted as she trudged back to the fuel tank. “Not much longer now.”

The clouds had thinned as they worked, allowing the midday sun to finally put in an appearance. It was a strange experience to be crunching through snow almost up to your knees with the sun so bright overhead and yet be so damn cold.

Emily filled the can one final time and heaved it back to the waiting Cat. She placed it on the gantry and then climbed up herself. When she had poured the last few drops into the Cat, she replaced the metal cap on the tank and screwed it down tight, tossing the empty can out into the snow.

She stood for a moment in the sun, catching her breath and stretching out the kinks in her back. Thank God she didn’t have to do that every day; she would be a wreck.

She had left the sheet of wood and tape she’d found earlier resting on the Cat’s rear track. Now she picked them up and climbed into the cabin. She stripped away the makeshift repair from the windshield, tossing it out into the snow. While Rhiannon held the board, Emily quickly taped it into place, doubling up the amount of tape just to be sure.

Back in the driver’s seat, the board partially obscured the right side of her view, but she could make do.

“Let’s make camp,” Emily said to Rhiannon as she steered the Cat toward what looked like the reception area for the hotel. A sign above the door read SLATE CREEK INN in large red letters.

She was reticent to leave the warmth of the cab behind them again so soon, but their cramped legs and stiff backs welcomed the promise of an opportunity to rest. “Stay in the Cat with Thor, okay? Until I know it’s safe.”

Rhiannon clearly wanted out of the claustrophobic cab, but she nodded her acknowledgment.

There were no signs of any other survivors in the camp—no telltale smoke from a fire, no fresh tracks in the snow. Of course that didn’t mean that there couldn’t be someone inside any of these buildings. The rumble of the Cat’s engine would have traveled for miles, arriving long before they had and alerting anyone or anything that they were going to have visitors.

Emily climbed the wooden steps up to the entrance and pushed open the door with her shoulder. Leaning inside, she quickly looked over the room. There was a rickety-looking reception desk and a well-worn but comfortable-looking sofa in one corner. A selection of candy bars on a rack in front of the register sat next to a line of mummified sandwiches. Against the farthest wall was a glass-fronted refrigerator with a selection of still-frozen ice cream on one of the shelves. Several liter-size bottles of soda were lined up like soldiers along a metal rack next to the refrigerator.

Emily made her way down the corridor connecting the reception area to the rooms and checked each room one by one.

She settled on the last room at the farthest end of the building. The beds were still made, each with a thick gray blanket. The room was also the farthest from the entrance, so there was only one direction any possible threat could come from, which meant she would be able to sleep a little more comfortably.

Back at the Cat, Emily collected Rhiannon and Thor, along with their supplies, then led them back through the building to their accommodations.

Rhiannon made a face when she saw the wood-lined walls of the tiny room, but she flopped down on the left bed with a huge sigh as though she had been on her feet all day instead of cruising in the comfort of a heated cab, snoozing her way through the majority of the journey.

The room was far too small for them to use the gas cooker safely, so Emily designated the next room down as their kitchen for the evening and set up the gas stove on the floor between the beds in that room. Despite the relative comfort the Cat had afforded them, they were both looking forward to something hot, Emily thought as she heated the stew. They were both tired of the granola bars and bags of chips they had snacked on for most of the journey since leaving Fairbanks. Emily still had a couple of cans of Dinty Moore beef stew that she had been saving, and her mouth began to water at the thought of it, even though the stuff gave her awful gas. Well, she could always blame Thor.

Back in their room, Emily found Rhiannon sitting on the side of her bed. The girl’s head was in her hands and tears rolled down her cheeks, forming a tiny partially frozen pool of spilled emotion between her feet. Thor was sitting next to the girl on the bed, his head in her lap, his eyes fixed on the child.

“Hey?” said Emily, gently setting the bowls of steaming stew on the floor. “What’s wrong, kiddo?” It took Rhiannon a few moments to gather herself before she answered.

“What day is it?” she said.

Emily had to pause for a moment and think. Jeez? She hadn’t given it much thought, but she was pretty sure it was…“Thursday,” she said. “Yeah. It’s a Thursday. Why?”

“But what date…What date is it?”

Emily did some quick math in her head. “It’s the twenty-fourth,” she replied. This apparently was the wrong answer because the girl burst into tears again.

“Hey, hey, hey.” Emily slid in next to the girl, their parkas crackling against each other as she placed her arm around Rhiannon’s shoulder, pulling her close. “What is it, sweetheart? What’s wrong?”

Through a barrage of sniffles and tears Rhiannon turned and looked at Emily. “It’s my birthday,” she said. “Today’s my birthday.”

Emily was taken aback, but after a moment, she leaned in and gave Rhiannon a kiss on the crown of her head. “Happy birthday,” she said, pulling back and smiling as genuinely as she could. “How old are you?”

“Thirteen.”

“Wow! You’re a teenager, kiddo. Congratulations. We have to do something special. Hold on here for a moment.” Emily grabbed the flashlight and headed out of the room, toward the reception area. Pushing through the doors, she shone her light around the darkening room until she found what she was looking for. She pulled open the door to the refrigerator and grabbed a selection of the ice-cream cartons and a liter of Coke to go with it. The Coke was almost ice, but she figured she could squeeze out a glass or so each; it might be a little slushy, but still…

“Here you go, birthday girl,” she said as she reentered the room. “Sorry I don’t have any candles.” She handed the girl a fork from the backpack. “Or clean spoons,” she added with a smile. “You know, the best way to eat ice cream is with a fork anyway. Makes it easier.” To illustrate the point, Emily popped the top off the tub of Strawberry Surprise and scooped a forkful into her mouth.

“Mmmmm! Mmmmm! Mmmmm! Here, try some.” Rhiannon halfheartedly dug into the tub and pulled out a large chunk of strawberry-laden ice cream and took a bite while Thor watched expectantly.

“Can’t leave you out, can we?” said Emily as she tossed Thor a piece of the frozen confectionery. He swallowed it whole and beat his tail against the blanket in appreciation. “Nope. No more for you until you wish Rhiannon a happy birthday,” she insisted. This brought a smile to Rhia’s face, and Emily seized the moment, popping open the tub of double chocolate fudge. Rhiannon’s eyes lit up as she chewed the ice cream, savoring the flavor.

“Owww,” she said. “Brain freeze.”

For some reason the irony of eating ice cream in a freezing shack just a few miles from the edge of the Arctic Circle and getting brain freeze suddenly became the funniest thing both Rhiannon and Emily had ever heard. It started with a fit of giggles from Rhiannon, as she clasped her hand to her forehead, and quickly spread to Emily, then back to Rhiannon until they were both roaring with laughter. Thor skipped between the two, barking his confusion but happy to join in anyway.

In the midst of the laughter, Emily had an idea. She glanced out the window. There was still enough light left for what she was planning.

“Okay, birthday girl. Why don’t you grab those two plastic boxes from inside the backpack for me?”

Rhiannon looked perplexed. “These?” she asked as she pulled the two plastic cases containing the pistols Emily had scavenged from the store back in Fairbanks. Opening the cases, Emily pulled out the Glock and then the smaller Ruger Bearcat revolver.

“Guns?” said Rhiannon, a little awed.

Emily smiled back at her. “One for each of us,” she said and winked. She checked both pistols, trying to remember the lessons Nathan had given to her on handling guns so very long ago, then loaded them carefully, adding a handful of extra ammo for each weapon into both her jacket’s front pockets. Rhiannon watched her intently as she worked on the pistols.

“All right,” Emily said finally, satisfied the pistols were safe. “Eat your stew and then let’s go shoot something.”

They stood just outside the reception building, facing a drift of snow. Emily had placed the empty cans of stew on the top of the drift, then added four bottles of frozen soda.

“The most important thing is to always treat a gun like it’s loaded,” said Emily as she unpacked the two pistols from their cases. “And never point it at anyone, or anything…unless you intend to shoot it.”

Emily popped out the cylinder of the Ruger and checked it was empty, then handed it to Rhiannon. “How’s it feel?”

Rhiannon balanced the little pistol in her hand, gauging its weight. “It’s lighter than I thought,” she said.

“Yeah, well, it’s just a beginner’s pistol, so it’s a good one to start you off with. You want to shoot something?”

Rhia nodded enthusiastically. Emily beckoned for the gun back and proceeded to load it from the box of .22 rounds. “See, you pop open the chamber like this.” Emily pressed the release on the side of the pistol and the chamber slipped out. “Then you insert one round into each of the holes,” she continued as she loaded the pistol. “And always make sure your finger is off the trigger, okay? Here you go.” She handed the loaded weapon back to the girl.

Emily moved behind Rhia and took both her wrists in her hands. “So now you need to stand with your feet a little bit apart.” Emily demonstrated the correct shooting stance. “That’s it, maybe just a little wider. Perfect. Now, bring the arm with your pistol in it up and point it in the direction of the target. Bring your other hand up and cup it around the gun hand like this…That’s right. How’s that feel?”

“Okay,” said Rhiannon, suppressing a nervous giggle.

“All right, now look through the notch on the rear sight until you see the pokey-up bit at the end of the barrel. Got it? Now make sure they are level with each other. Focus on that front sight again—make sure you keep both sights level—and put it over what you want to shoot.”

Emily let go of the girl and allowed her to position the gun herself.

“I’m really nervous.”

“That’s okay, sweetie. So was I the first time I fired a gun, but there’s no need to be. Just relax and concentrate. Now use your thumb to pull back the hammer.”

Emily watched as Rhia slipped her thumb over the notched hammer and pulled it back until it clicked into place.

“Perfect. You ready? Okay, put your finger on the trigger, but don’t pull it yet. Now breathe just a little bit, and, when you’re ready, pull the trigger real slow.”

Rhiannon let out a nervous squeak at the crack of the gun firing, completely missing any of the targets they had set up. The squeak quickly flowed into a fit of excited giggles as she brought the gun back up on the next target, cocked it, and squeezed off another round. That one went wide, too. But her third shot clipped a can and sent it spinning into the air.

“Yes!” she yelled, waving both hands in the air.

“Careful, that thing’s still loaded. You don’t want to accidentally shoot yourself…or me.”

“Sorry.”

“S’okay. Just remember guns are dangerous. Let’s try again.”

Emily had been waiting for an appropriate time to teach the kid how to shoot since she had picked up the pistols in Fairbanks. The sooner she learned, the safer she would be. The future was an unknown quantity for all of them now, and Emily would need to pass on as many of her survival skills as possible to the girl.

Emily waited until Rhiannon had fired off all six rounds, then showed her how to pop open the cylinder, dump the spent cartridges, and reload with new ammo. As she watched Rhia carefully aim and fire off each round, she checked her Glock, fed rounds into the magazine, and slammed it home.

“Not bad,” she said, “Not bad at all.” Actually the kid was pretty damn good, hitting four of the six targets. For a kid who had never fired a gun before, that was quite impressive.

When Rhia had discharged her final round, Emily asked her to empty the gun and set it aside. “Go set up those targets for me, would you?”

Rhia crunched through the snow and set the fallen cans and plastic bottles upright again, then crunched her way back to Emily.

It had been a while since she had fired a handgun, and it had never been her favorite thing to do. She preferred the stopping power of her Mossberg, but the pistol would be a more convenient weapon to carry with her than the shotgun, and it was quite easily concealed, too.

Making sure Rhiannon was behind her, she sighted on the first target and fired, popping the can into the air. She took aim at the next and sent that one cartwheeling away, too. She finished off the rest of the targets with similar efficiency; the boom of the nine-millimeter rounds echoed around the camp.

“Now I know who to call if we’re ever attacked by a roving band of canned fruit,” laughed Rhiannon.

“You’re pretty sassy for a kid who only managed to hit half her targets,” mocked Emily, sticking her tongue out at the girl. “Why don’t you see if you can do better this time?”

They spent another half hour plinking away at their makeshift targets, which by then were little more than shredded metal and plastic. By the time they packed their weapons away, Rhiannon was able to hit everything she aimed at. She was turning into a regular Katniss…minus the bow.

They made their way back to the bedroom by the light of their flashlights. Emily pulled the blanket back from Rhiannon’s bed for her. “Climb in, birthday girl,” she said, her own eyes beginning to ache with exhaustion. Rhiannon slipped between the sheets and turned to face Emily; the fur around her parka’s hood surrounded her face like a halo.

“Will you sleep next to me?” she asked, the hint of embarrassment in her voice all but hidden by the return of her sadness.

Emily hesitated, then climbed in next to her, pulled the blanket over both of them, and slipped her arm around the girl’s chest, pulling her close.

“Emily?” Rhia asked, her voice little more than a whisper.

“Yes, sweetheart?”

“I miss my daddy and Ben.”

Emily had to gain control of her own emotions before she answered. “I know, baby. I know.”

CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX

Deadhorse was a sprawling town of storage outbuildings, temporary housing, offices, heavy equipment, and other vehicles. There seemed to be acres and acres of it. Calling it a “town” was a bit of a misnomer, though; it looked more like some kind of rapidly assembled military base, with little thought or reason to how it had been laid out. Over the rooftops of a nearby garage, Emily could see several gigantic cranes, their booms reaching across the sky like frozen skeletal fingers.

“We need to let Jacob know we’ve arrived,” Emily said, smiling at Rhiannon.

“Can I call him?” she pleaded.

“Of course. Grab the phone for me.” There had been little opportunity to charge the sat-phone over the past few days; once they had hit Fairbanks, they had pretty much said good-bye to the sun, so they had been relying on the battery backup system. That was empty now, and there was very little charge left in the actual sat-phone’s battery. There was enough, maybe, for twenty minutes or so of talk time, if she was lucky. Rhiannon pulled the phone from the side pocket of the backpack, unfolded the antenna, and pressed the On button. She waited for it to wake, then hit Redial and the Speakerphone buttons in succession.

The phone rang a few times longer than normal before Jacob picked up. “Emily.”

“No, it’s Rhia. Emily’s driving. She said I could call you. I learned to shoot.”

There was a pause on the other end as Jacob considered how and what to reply to first. “Well,” he said finally. “That’s great, I guess.” There was a certain stiffness to his voice that Emily hadn’t heard in all the times they had talked, and she wondered if he was feeling okay.

“We’re here,” Rhiannon continued, as if Jacob had said nothing at all. “We just arrived in Deadhorse.”

“That’s fantastic. Emily, do you know where you are exactly? Do you see any street signs?” The stiff tone had all but disappeared from Jacob’s voice. Emily and Rhiannon’s heads swiveled back and forth, searching for some kind of an indication of where they were. She didn’t recall having seen any road signs since they had passed the weathered sign announcing they had arrived at Deadhorse. The place was a rabbit warren, and with the road surfaces buried beneath several feet of snow, there were no visual cues to guide them, either.

“There’s nothing,” Emily answered. “We’re outside a building called Red Dragon Construction, if that’s of any help.”

It wasn’t; Jacob had never heard of them. “There are hundreds of businesses in and around Deadhorse,” he said. “New ones arrived every week, and it’s been a while since I’ve been over there. You just need to head north until you hit Prudhoe Bay on the coast. You can’t miss it—it’s all that separates you from the Arctic. When you reach it, you have to look for the dock. You’ll know it when you see it. There’ll be a boat there you can use to get to me.”

“A boat?” Emily said. No one had said anything about her having to drive—if that’s what you did with a boat—a freaking boat anywhere. “I thought one of you would come and pick us up?”

“We would, but we lost our boat in a storm a couple of nights ago. So it’s a good job you arrived when you did, otherwise we’d have to swim over.”

Nice of him to let her know, Emily thought. But she said, “Well, okay, I guess. If I can learn to drive a car and one of whatever the hell you call this thing we’re sitting in, I guess I can drive a boat.”

“Pilot,” Jacob corrected.

“What?”

“You pilot a boat.”

“Really? All right. I guess I can pilot a boat then.”

The phone made a beeping sound in her ear that it had never made before. She glanced quickly at the front readout: “Low Battery” flashed repeatedly on the LCD screen.

“Jacob, the phone’s about to die. Tell me how we get to you.”

The storm blew in fifteen minutes later. It started as a swirling white mist wafting low against the ground, sending mini tornadoes of already fallen powder swirling into the air. It quickly gathered momentum, and soon huge flakes of snow fell like petals from the pregnant clouds, dropping a silent white curtain over the land. Emily had the Cat’s windshield wipers on full blast, but even they couldn’t help keep back the veil of white that had descended. Within a minute visibility had dropped to thirty feet, then twenty, and then Emily could barely see much farther than the end of the engine cowling. The Cat’s headlamps did little to help; their powerful beams were dissipated by every falling particle of snow.

A huge gust of wind buffeted the Cat, rattling the cabin.

“Shit,” Emily spat, leaning forward in the driver’s seat in the hope of gaining a few extra inches of visibility, her nose almost touching the glass of the windshield. There was no way she was going to be able to navigate through this. She could be going around in circles for all she knew, or worse, she could drive off onto one of the frozen lakes that dotted the spaces between buildings. A second gust of wind hit the Cat, this time from behind. The vehicle bucked, and Emily thought she felt the Cat lift slightly off its tracks before dropping down again. It felt like the entire ground beneath them was shifting, like they were in the middle of an earthquake.

Before the world had disappeared, she had passed a two-level office building on the left. It was only a few hundred feet behind them, but as she tried to locate it again, there was no sign of it. The ravenous snowstorm had already devoured all trace of it. She could either choose to sit the storm out or try and find the building, which she thought would at least offer some better shelter than the cab of the Cat. Who knew how long the storm could last? It might be hours or it could be days, and they only had so much gas left.

Rhiannon was doing her best to keep her composure, but Emily could see the girl was spooked. They were completely disorientated by the storm that fizzed and swirled by their windows like static on a TV screen.

“I saw a building a little while back,” Emily told her. “I’m going to try and find it again.” Rhiannon nodded and slipped into her parka while Emily turned the Cat around until she was pointing in what she thought was the approximate direction of the office building she had spotted.

She eased the Cat forward at a slow crawl, barely four miles an hour. She searched the depthless white ahead, a dull ache already beginning to form at the back of her neck and behind her eyes as she strained for a sign, anything, that would indicate where the building was.

Wind thudded against the side of the Cat. Rhiannon yelped, and Thor gave an agitated bark from the backseat.

The building could be five feet away and she would drive right past it. As if to illustrate the hopelessness of their predicament, an extra strong flurry of snow splattered against the windshield. Momentarily overwhelmed, the windshield wipers strained against the sudden added weight until finally flinging the snow off the side of the Cat and continuing their relentless swish-swish back and forth.

The big machine continued to edge forward as minute after minute passed, and still there was no sign of the building she had seen. Emily was convinced she had passed it. She was going to have to turn around.

“There it is.” Rhiannon’s excited cry was accompanied by the sound of her knuckles hitting the glass of the window. “There. On the right.”

Emily strained to see past the girl, who was still excitedly pointing into the white beyond the cab. There was…something…just…“Yes!” Emily shouted excitedly. She could make out a darker shadow in the swirling snow in front of them and off to the right. It had to be it.

She swung the Cat in that direction and edged forward until she was certain it was the building and not some weird trick of the storm.

Yes! There it was. A two-story box of a building with only the occasional narrow window sitting flush against the weatherworn outer walls to disrupt the absolute utilitarian functionality of the design.

“Hold on,” said Emily, finally aware that she had been biting so hard on her bottom lip she could taste blood. “I have to swing this thing around.” She needed to maneuver the Cat as close to the entrance on her side as possible, so she could hop out and make sure the doors of the building were unlocked. The Cat’s thermometer registered the outside temperature as minus fifteen degrees. If you factored in the windchill, it was probably another ten or fifteen beyond that. She would have only minutes to get them inside before the effects of that kind of low temperature began to affect them.

She pulled the Cat away from the building, then turned the wheel hard, disengaging the right-side tracks while the left continued to move, turning the vehicle while not moving it forward. When she thought she had the right angle of approach, she began to edge forward while slowly turning the wheel to the left a few degrees at a time. The taupe front of the office resolved into view, its narrow windows rattling as another blast of wind rushed past the Cat, hammering at the walls. Emily twisted the wheel a little farther and slid the Cat forward the few remaining feet until she was parallel with the building.

She found the entrance to the building farther along. It was a recessed area covered by a portico; icicles hung like fangs from the edges of the overhang.

Emily put on her jacket, pulled the hood fully over her head, and zipped it up.

“Are you ready?” she asked Rhiannon. The girl nodded affirmatively, a flashlight already cradled in her lap.

She waited for the next blast of wind to pass, then pushed open the door of the cab, leaped out, and slammed the door shut behind her, almost losing her balance as the wind flared up again and pushed her toward the edge of the metal gantry. She steadied herself, then beckoned to Rhiannon to follow her. The kid was out and beside her in a second, Thor close behind. Even he gave a shiver as the wind cut through the group huddling against the side of the big machine.

“Let’s go,” Emily yelled, her voice muffled by the material of the hood and the roaring of the wind ripping past the building.

They climbed carefully down to the ground and headed into the enclosed entrance area. Emily rattled the big door. It was locked.

“Shit. Stay here. I have to head back to the Cat,” she told Rhiannon.

Back at the vehicle, Emily opened the rear passenger door, pulled out the shotgun, and climbed back down again. The wind had gone from the occasional gust to an almost constant force against her now, bashing and pushing her as she staggered through the ever-deepening snow back to where she had left the girl and the dog.

“What are you going to do?” Rhiannon yelled over the wind when she saw the shotgun in Emily’s gloved hands.

“Unlock the door,” she yelled back. “Now, take Thor and get around the corner for me, okay?”

When she was sure both of her companions were out of harm’s way from any ricochets from the shotgun, Emily examined the door, inspecting where she thought the lock mechanism should be. Even with the cover of the portico, it was still almost impossible to see straight; the snow whirled and gushed around the recess of the entrance. When she was certain she knew where the keyhole was, she brought the shotgun to her shoulder and aimed, but her gloved finger could not fit through the trigger guard of the weapon.

Have to take it off, she thought. She leaned the shotgun against the door, unzipped the glove, and pulled off the Velcro flap that secured it around her wrist. Instantly she felt the freezing sting of the wind begin to whip her body heat away. It was like plunging her hand into an icy bowl of water; she could feel the blood in her arm begin to chill all the way up to her elbow already. She picked up the shotgun again and brought it up to the lock, the end of the muzzle just a couple of inches from the door, then slipped her finger onto the trigger. She gave a yell of pain and almost dropped the gun. The metal of the trigger against her finger felt like flame against her exposed skin. Gritting her teeth against the pain, she turned her head away from the door and pulled the trigger.

When she looked back, there was a gaping hole where the lock had been. She quickly fitted the glove back over her throbbing hand, grabbed the door handle, and pulled. It swung toward her.

“Rhiannon!” Emily yelled. “Let’s move.”

Rhiannon’s head appeared around the corner of the portico, closely followed by Thor’s. Emily held the door open and beckoned them both into the darkness of the building, then followed them inside.

Water fell from the ceiling ahead of them, caught in the beam of the flashlight as it drip-drip-dripped from the acoustic tiles, forming a semifrozen pool of slush on the heavy-duty carpet of the reception area. There were pictures lining the walls of oil rigs, dirty but happy-looking workers, construction crews hard at work, and big pieces of mechanical equipment that Emily had no idea what they did.

Dear God, it was freezing. Even with the thick coats, trousers, and gloves, she could still feel the insidious siphoning away of heat from her body. Is this what they were going to be condemned to? For the rest of her life would she be bundled up like this, always wondering when she would feel warm again? Wondering if she would ever see the sun, feel it against her skin? It was the kind of cold that, once it burrowed into the marrow of your bones, you would need to spend a month on a beach in the Caribbean sun to ever erase the memory of it. Emily pulled off her glove again and moved her trigger finger into the light of her flashlight. A red crescent moon–shaped welt had already formed on the soft pad between the knuckle and the fingertip. It stung like a son of a—

“Emily?” Rhiannon’s questioning voice pulled her back into the moment. “Are you okay?”

No. No, she was most certainly not okay. She was probably the furthest away from okay she had ever been. That’s what she wanted to say, but instead she said, “Yes, sweetheart. I’m fine. Let’s find a room to wait this out, shall we?”

“I wish we’d brought the supply bag with us. I’m starved,” the kid continued, as if this was just another day. And, Emily supposed, it was just another day for her now. She would probably forget the majority of her early life, the little luxuries that had made her life so very easy and enjoyable before all this shit fell to earth. Little Rhiannon would adapt, overcome, and move on. Assuming, of course, that she lived through whatever hardships and challenges were still headed their way. I, on the other hand, Emily mused, am too goddamn old for all this.

Emily fished around in one of her parka’s many pockets and pulled out a Mars bar she had stashed there at some point. “Here you go,” she said, handing it to Rhia.

While the girl snacked on the candy, Emily checked out the rooms they were passing, pushing open doors and peeking inside cabinets. There was little point in looking around, she supposed, but what else were they supposed to do until the storm passed? They had been sitting for most of the past couple of days; a half hour of exercise wandering around this place would not do them any harm. If they had to, they would spend the night there, but there was still plenty of time for them to get to the dock Jacob had mentioned. He had said that the Stockton Islands were about a ten-mile ride northeast of Deadhorse by boat.

“Don’t worry,” he had told her when she’d said she had never even been on a boat let alone navigated one before. “Just hug the coast as closely as you can, and you won’t miss me. You’ll do just fine.”

Emily absentmindedly pushed open another door with the toe of her boot and was about to step inside but stopped halfway across the threshold, instinctively turning her body to block Rhiannon from seeing any farther into the room, squelching the scream of horror that rose to her throat.

Six…no, seven bodies lay sprawled on the floor in one corner of the room. There were two women and the rest were men. They had died panicked, climbing over each other in a vain attempt to escape the threat that had stood in the room with them.

“Stay outside,” Emily almost yelled at Rhiannon, who had bumped into her back and now stood in the corridor perplexed.

“What—”

“Just do as I say, please.”

The girl gave a huff and leaned her back against the opposite wall, bouncing the heel of her left boot off the carpet in agitation.

Emily turned back to the bodies. A layer of frost covered the skin of all of the victims, like freezer-burned meat that had been left too long in a refrigerator. They looked totally unaffected by the red rain. No sign of infection at all. But as Emily inched closer, she could see each person had been shot at least once, some several times.

Had they survived the red rain only to be murdered? Or had this all happened in the panic before the effects took hold? It was impossible to tell. But what was certain was that someone had murdered these people in cold blood and she had no way to know if that person was still waiting in the building for them.

Emily backed out of the room, making sure she closed the door behind her. Rhiannon was still sulking against the far wall, but she stopped kicking her heel when she saw the look on Emily’s face.

“Is something wrong?” she asked.

“Yes,” said Emily. “Something is very wrong.”

Outside the storm blew with as much ferocity as it had when they’d first entered. The offices no longer seemed silent. Instead, every move, every exhalation, every crackle of material against skin seemed amplified beyond normal, revealing their position to whoever had murdered those people in the room. Every creak above their heads or squeak of some unseen tile or loose window suddenly became the killer, creeping toward them. In a moment, the building had turned from a sanctuary into a potential trap…or a tomb.

Emily pulled Rhiannon close to her. “Don’t make a sound,” she whispered into her ear. “We have to get out of here now.”

They could hole up in the office and hope that the killer of those poor people was gone or dead somewhere out there, but Emily knew there was no way she could be sure of their safety. Especially knowing that at any moment someone could burst in and try to kill them, or worse. And what if there was more than one assailant? What if there were two or three of them? She was confident she could defend Rhia and herself against one person, but more than that? She didn’t know if she could do it, especially as they were obviously armed. And what if they found the Cat outside? They could take that and leave her and Rhiannon stranded with no means of escape, condemned to a slow death by freezing or starvation.

She looked down at Thor. He seemed perfectly at ease, but he hadn’t strayed very far from them since they had entered the building. And now that she thought about it, he hadn’t disappeared for his usual exploration of the offices. Maybe he could sense death in these rooms or maybe he sensed something or someone else.

Her mind was so damn tired. Having to continually think two steps ahead was taking its toll on her mentally. Her head felt as fogged as the snow-swept land beyond their shelter’s walls.

They had to get out of there now. And that meant taking their chances in the storm.

Whoever had killed those people could still be in the building, and that was just an unacceptable risk. There was only one place that she knew was safe, and that was with Jacob and his crew. If they left now and pushed hard—and didn’t get lost in the blizzard outside or crash or drown in some lake—they could reach the coast by late afternoon and find a boat. If they had to sleep in the Cat with the engine running to wait out the storm, so be it. They could afford to lose the fuel at that point.

Her mind made up, Emily turned her attention to Rhiannon.

“Something very bad happened in that room back there,” she said in the same whispered tone. “The person who did it might still be here with us, so I think it’s better that we get out of here.” Rhiannon’s eyes became wide, but she nodded that she understood. “We’re going to head back to the Cat and drive out of here. It’s only a few miles to the coast, and then, once we find the boat, we’ll be safe.”

Emily unslung the shotgun from her shoulder and smiled at Rhiannon. “Let’s go,” she mouthed and began heading back toward the reception area. “Keep the light ahead of us,” she told the girl as they crept back through the darkened hallway toward the entrance.

They had just entered the reception area and Emily had begun to relax when the outside door suddenly flew open. Emily instantly brought the shotgun to her shoulder, her finger caressing the trigger, but then the door slammed shut again with a thud that echoed off the walls.

“Just the wind,” she told Rhiannon. “It was just the wind.” This whole place—scratch that, she thought, and make it the entire world—had turned into a haunted house. Every unexpected noise hid something sinister, every shadow a potential killer.

Emily held the exit door shut against the grip of the wind while she checked outside through the small window at the top of the door. The wind had definitely picked up, but the snow looked to have eased a little. She could make out the shapes of covered vehicles in the parking lot about fifty feet or so away and she could see the hulking outline of the snow-covered Cat parked just off to the left. It was an improvement over their arrival, just over an hour or so earlier.

Emily fished the keys to the Cat from her pocket and pushed open the door, ushering Rhiannon and Thor out first. She followed behind them as they made their way to the parked Cat.

Snow had covered the vehicle’s tracks. Emily cleared it quickly, then boosted Rhiannon up, followed by Thor, and finally pulled herself up.

It wasn’t until they were all in the cab of the Cat with the engine running and the doors all locked that Emily felt they were safe.

Emily eased the Sno-Cat away from the building and out into the storm again.

Jacob had told her to just head north until they hit the coast. Visibility was still not much better than fifty feet, so she would have to rely on the digital compass display on the Cat’s computer screen to guide them in the right direction.

She kept her speed down to ten miles an hour while trying to take what looked like the most logical route between each set of buildings and on to the next, so she wouldn’t veer off course. The ache behind her eyes had turned into a throbbing headache that felt like knives being plunged into her brain. Even through the fog of pain, she quickly realized she could spot where the actual roads were, even though they were buried under several feet of snow, and she began looking for areas where the top layer of snow was just a little higher than the surrounding areas.

She managed to keep the Cat rolling along on a heading of more or less due north, only occasionally having to adjust her course to avoid a building or vehicle that blocked her path. Once she hit something solid and immovable hidden beneath the snow, but the Cat’s tracks and suspension were up and over it before she even had time to react.

The wind still pummeled them, lashing great sheets of snow across the vehicle, but then it would pass them by and their limited but acceptable view of the world would return and they would continue on, edging ever closer to their destination. And it seemed to Emily that with each mile that passed, the ferocity of the wind dropped just a little, the snowfall becoming less and less impenetrable.

She wasn’t sure whether the ride to the coast took one hour or four—after the first few minutes the landscape all seemed to merge into one—but as she rounded the corner of a large yellow building, Emily saw the ocean about a quarter mile ahead of them.

They had made it.

CHAPTER TWENTY-SEVEN

Emily was surprised at how still the Arctic Ocean was. It was more like a lake than any of the oceans she had ever seen in real life or on TV. Waves of dirty gray water lapped gently at the snow-covered shoreline, the only movement on an otherwise glasslike surface.

Prudhoe Bay was a horseshoe-shaped concavity about four miles across at its mouth. In the distance Emily could see a set of huge tanks jutting up above the horizon on the opposite side of the bay; ahead of her the bay curved away toward the distant horizon.

She brought the Cat to a halt at what she judged was a safe distance from the shoreline. It was impossible to judge exactly where the land ended and the sand or shale or whatever lay beneath the snow started.

Her view was substantially better than it had been when they first set out; the snow had seemed to almost fade to nothing as they’d neared the coast. Still, low clouds covered the sky from horizon to horizon, making it difficult to see much farther than a mile or so.

“It’s beautiful,” said Rhiannon.

Emily supposed it was, in its own way. Not exactly her first choice of where she would want to spend the rest of her life, but at least she had a life to look forward to, unlike the majority of humanity.

Her eyes followed the coast as it curved off to her right, then headed north. About a mile off from their location, Emily could see a spit of land jutting off from the coastline. A large blue building sat at the end of it, about five hundred feet out into the bay.

“I think that’s where we need to be,” she said to Rhiannon, pointing so the girl could see. “That’s the dock where Jacob said we would find the boat.”

The engine growled back into life as Emily accelerated the Cat toward the distant dock. A relatively clear access road appeared from the snow as they approached the point where the offshoot of land jutted out into the water. It extended up toward the blue building, so Emily turned the Cat onto it, relieved to be on a solid surface for the first time in almost seven hundred miles.

The building was made from huge sheets of corrugated steel with a large gap at the southern end, big enough for the Cat to easily drive through with room to spare. There didn’t appear to have ever been doors to the building, or if there had been, they were long gone. She parked the Cat in a space below a set of metal stairs that led up to a second-level office, reached by a gangway that ran around the perimeter of the building.

Rhiannon was out of the Cat before Emily could stop her. She’d jumped down to the ground and had run around to Emily’s side of the vehicle, closely followed by Thor, before Emily had even managed to open her own door.

“Careful,” Emily yelled, stooping to pick up the Mossberg. The smell of brine and ozone filled her lungs as she stepped off the track of the Cat onto the ground next to Rhiannon.

The seaward side of the building had a large section of its wall cut away, exposing the concrete floor to the sea. Emily assumed that was to allow boats to pull into the building and discharge their cargo and any passengers out of reach of the kind of storm she had just driven through.

There were two boats tied to mooring bollards. One looked like it was a tug boat or a fishing trawler. It bobbed up and down, pulling against the mooring, old automobile tires tied around the body of the boat banging against the concrete dock. There was no way in hell she was going to be able to pilot that thing.

The second boat, moored at the opposite end of the dock, was a lot smaller. Emily judged it to be about twenty or so feet in length; its shape reminded her of some of the fishing boats she would see out on the lakes back in Denison, Iowa, when she was growing up. It had an enclosed cabin, about the same size as the Sno-Cat, with several radio masts and what Emily took to maybe be a radar system of some kind. She wasn’t sure. At the back of the boat were two large outboard motors. Printed along the side of the hull in red were the words: UNIVERSITY OF ALASKA FAIRBANKS—CLIMATE RESEARCH.

That was the boat they were looking for.

“Stay away from the edge,” Emily warned as Rhiannon took a couple of inquisitive steps closer to the boat.

“Do you know how to drive this?” she asked, looking back over her shoulder at Emily as she ran her hands down the hull of the larger boat.

“You ‘pilot’ a boat,” Emily corrected her. “And I have absolutely no clue.”

Rhiannon handed Emily the last of the supplies from the pile they had made on the dockside. Emily stowed them in a back corner of the wheelhouse and on one of the six seats the boat sported.

The controls of the boat were similar to the Dodge Durango and the Sno-Cat only in that they all had a steering wheel. That was about where the similarity ended. There were several gauges and indicators on the control console that Emily figured had something to do with the speed, oil pressure, and wind direction. A black box with a dull LCD screen was perched just behind the steering wheel, and Emily again assumed that this was some kind of navigation instrument similar to a GPS, or maybe it was a sonar. She had no idea. There were no brake or accelerator pedals, just a handle to the right of the captain’s chair that she thought was probably the throttle for the two big engines at the back of the boat. Next to that was the slot for the ignition; the key had been helpfully sitting on the captain’s seat when they’d arrived. To the right of the ignition a large red button read: ENGINE START.

She had no idea what any of the gizmos or other dials actually did, nor did she think that she needed to. “You just need to start the engine and point it north along the coast,” Jacob had explained to her. “It’s a double hull, so it’s really stable. Just don’t hit anything, and you’ll be fine.” She hoped he was right, because she was sure that if she capsized them, they wouldn’t last more than two minutes in these frigid ice-strewn waters.

“Is that the last of it?” she asked.

Rhiannon nodded enthusiastically. “That’s it, Cap’n,” she said, in a pretty good impression of Johnny Depp’s character from the Pirates of the Caribbean movies. She had been using the same accent and addressing Emily as Cap’n ever since they had started switching the supplies from the Cat to the boat. Rhia was dreadfully impressed with her own mimicry, apparently, because a fit of giggles always followed the sentence.

Emily didn’t mind; given the circumstances, it was good to hear the kid laughing. And it helped relieve the tension she felt about taking the boat out.

The SUV and Cat had been one thing: she knew where the brakes were and could always stop and just get out if the need arose. But this was something totally different. The closest she had ever come to a boat was watching a rerun of Titanic on TV. If something went wrong out there, she could end up drowning the both of them.

Just stick close to the coastline, and you’ll be fine, Jacob’s memory reminded her again.

“Okay, you landlubber,” Emily said, playing along with her own best pirate voice. “Let’s untie that knotty rope thing over there and see what we can do, shall we?”

Rhiannon pulled at the knot of the rope tied to the mooring bollard, tossing it onto the deck of the boat, narrowly missing Thor, who had already made himself comfortable next to the supplies. Emily took Rhiannon’s hand and helped her leap into the boat, which was already beginning to bob away from the concrete dock.

She made her way back into the wheelhouse and sat in the captain’s chair. “Best sit down,” she said to Rhiannon. She turned the key to the “on” position and pressed the big red button next to it.

There was a sound like metal rubbed against metal, then each of the two engines coughed once, billowed a gray puff of smoke, and sparked into life, kicking a fountain of water into the air. The boat immediately began to move forward, heading straight for the tugboat on the opposite side of the dock.

“Oh, shit,” said Rhiannon, instantly throwing her hand over her mouth, her eyes betraying her surprise at letting slip a cussword in front of Emily. If Emily had noticed, she didn’t let on; she was too busy turning the wheel frantically to the right, trying to avoid the slowly but inexorably approaching bigger vessel.

The boat began to turn…sharply. It missed the other boat, but now it was heading toward the metal wall of the shed separating the sea from the inside of the dock. She spun the wheel in the opposite direction, this time not so hard. The pointy end of the boat began to gradually drift away from the wall as it leveled out. When the sides of the boat were parallel with the dock and the opposite wall, Emily moved the wheel back to the center position and, after a couple more minor corrections, managed to get the boat moving in a straight line.

She aimed the front of the boat for the gap that led out to the ocean beyond, her hand hovering over the throttle lever but still too unsure to touch it.

They coasted through the opening and into the open water, bouncing on the rougher waves beyond the dock building. The front of the boat dipped suddenly and rose dramatically before dropping down onto the surface with a splash that rocked the inside of the vessel. Emily dropped her hand to the throttle and pushed slowly, listening to the throb of the engines increase as the boat began to pick up speed. The pointy bit—wasn’t it called the prow?—began to cut through the waves, which, contrary to her beachside observation, were a hell of a lot bigger than they had looked from the safety of the Sno-Cat’s cabin.

The incoming tide pushed back against the engines, and Emily had the distinct impression that they weren’t actually moving. Although how she was supposed to judge whether she was making any kind of headway was kind of beyond her. Everything out there seemed to be moving, and any object that she could use to judge her speed by was either too far away or shrouded by the clouds and falling snow.

“Screw it,” she said and pushed the throttle lever forward. This time the engines roared, and there was no doubt that they were moving as the prow lifted slightly off the ocean’s surface and pushed Emily and Rhiannon back into their seats.

“Wow!” said Rhiannon as the boat bounced and tilted over the waves, the coast a couple of hundred feet off the right of the boat now as Emily swung parallel to it and followed Jacob’s instructions, heading north along its rocky edge.

They were moving fast, water spraying across the glass of the wheelhouse. Emily almost pulled back on the throttle; her hand hovered over it as she considered what she should do next. It would be the safest thing to do, but she was so tired of all this. Tired of the constant stress and worry and driving and eating shitty meals and more driving. Tired of always being afraid and, dear God almighty, she was so very, very tired of traveling. She just wanted to lie in a bed and know that she was going to be sleeping in it the next night and the night after that. To eat a hot meal and have someone who wasn’t a teenager to talk to.

She wanted for all of this to finally be over.

That reality was now just forty miles or so away. They were almost there.

Her hand dropped to her side as she let the boat speed on.

CHAPTER TWENTY-EIGHT

Emily was convinced the temperature had dropped at least ten degrees since they’d left the harbor. There was a heater in the cabin, but it was struggling, working overtime just to keep the temperature above freezing. Rhiannon had situated herself next to it, blocking the flow of warm air into the cabin, which didn’t really help.

They had left the confines of Prudhoe Bay and entered the open sea beyond. As Emily had banked the boat around the outcrop that marked the entrance to the bay, a stronger crosscurrent caught the boat and slammed them sideways, pushing them rapidly toward the coast. The boat pitched and tossed like a roller coaster as Emily fought the wheel to keep from beaching.

“Oh my God. I’m going to throw up,” burped Rhiannon, her face turning green.

Emily ignored her and kept turning the wheel until the boat was facing out to sea again, then she powered up the engines and fought back against the waves that grabbed at the keel of the craft.

She pushed the throttle all the way to 75 percent and felt the propellers push the boat forward, cutting through the waves as they sped back out to sea. Judging they were far enough from the shore to not risk becoming grounded, Emily turned the boat back onto its new eastern heading and looked over at Rhiannon, who was still looking a little green but had managed to keep her food down. Thor was curled up in the corner, fast asleep and apparently oblivious to how close they had come to becoming a shipwreck.

They saw the first iceberg fifteen minutes later; it wasn’t very big, not much more than a ten-foot-by-fifteen-foot sheet of ice floating on the surface of the sea. But Emily gave it a wide birth, memories of the movie Titanic rising once again to the surface.

An iceberg! It was all a little too surreal.

An hour later they spotted the family of polar bears. There were three of them—a mother and two cubs—sauntering along the shoreline, their white coats stained brown with mud as they dipped their heads to examine rock-pools or lifted their noses to the wind, sniffing inquisitively.

Emily slowed the boat and joined Rhiannon in gawking at the sight. Even Thor seemed excited, watching from the back of the boat, his paws resting on a shelf so he could get a better look. It would have been a beautiful sight even before the devastation of the red rain. Seeing this first hint that there was still hope that some life had escaped the rain’s effects, well, it was just magical.

“Look how big they are,” said Rhiannon. “I never thought they would be so big.” The kid was right; the adult had to weigh at least four hundred pounds.

When momma bear stopped and turned to face the boat, taking a couple of tentative steps out into the ocean toward them, Emily decided they might be hungrier than they looked and eased the throttle forward, quickly putting some distance between the bears and the boat as she accelerated east.

Jacob had told them to look for maps when they were on board the boat, and they had found a bunch of them stowed in a drawer. Emily had reassigned Rhiannon her old job as navigator and set her to work finding a map that showed their destination. Rhiannon had quickly found one labeled “McClure and Stockton Islands and Vicinity” and laid it out on the floor where she could get a good look at it.

Glancing down at the map from behind the wheel, Emily thought it didn’t look like any kind of map she had ever seen. It gave a detailed outline of the coastline, but the sea was filled with squiggly lines and numbers that she thought probably represented the depth of the sea in those locations.

Emily couldn’t afford to take her attention off piloting the boat, so she was relying on Rhiannon to accurately predict their position, which she seemed to be very good at. She had quickly ascertained their position after leaving Prudhoe Bay and was calling out landmarks before they even appeared.

“This is Foggy Island Bay,” she had announced at one point. “There’s going to be something called a shoal coming up.” A few minutes later they had passed the shoal, a collection of elongated sandbars that formed a natural harbor. “Now we need to keep heading east, toward…” She paused as she tried to pronounce the name of the upcoming landmark. “Tig…Tig…Var…Iak. Tigvariak Island!” Rhiannon picked up the map and folded it so it was small enough to carry, staggering over to Emily as the boat bucked and rolled.

“Here’s where we are.” She tapped a finger against the coastline. “And here’s Tigvariak Island.” Her finger traced an imaginary line to a largish island just off the coast of the mainland. “And then,” she continued, “we just have to head this way to get to Jacob’s island.” She unfolded the top of the map to reveal the group of islands collectively known as the Stocktons, sitting about six miles farther out to sea and northeast of the farthest tip of Tigvariak Island.

Jacob was on the largest of the islands: Pole Island, a scythe-shaped mass of land approximately four miles in length and a quarter-mile wide.

It took the little boat another two hours to reach Tigvariak Island, a desolate-looking lump of rock that looked to be nothing more than rolling tundra. As Emily steered the boat along the craggy west coast of the island, she felt her nerves begin to get the better of her. They were about to head out into open ocean, and soon after they would be miles from land, with no navigational equipment other than the large compass on the boat’s control panel. As long as she kept the boat heading in a northeast direction, there was little chance that they would miss the little cluster of islands, but the idea of being so far from land made her very uneasy.

She had come this far using Jacob’s advice to guide her, and he had not been wrong so far, she reminded herself. If he said she could do it, then she had better believe she could.

There were only a few miles of their journey left. And she’d be damned if she was going to turn back now.

The coast of Alaska was a distant shadow on the horizon behind them as the little boat continued to bounce and cleave its way northeast through the swell of the Arctic Ocean. The farther away from land they moved, the more icebergs they saw in the water. While most of them were small clumps of floating white that bobbed harmlessly by, occasionally they would spot a larger sheet of ice that could easily put a hole in the hull of the boat. Emily had stationed Rhiannon up front with her; her younger eyes were better equipped to spot the dangerous bergs well before they got too close. Emily steered around them, hoping that these minor adjustments to their voyage would not throw them too far off from their original course.

The sea had become rougher, too. Huge swells lifted the boat, then dropped them down again, sending waves of water onto the deck outside their enclosed cabin. To the west Emily could see a bank of black clouds that descended from the sky down to sea level. It looked to be heading their way, and Emily hoped to God that they made it to shore before the storm caught up with them.

Rhiannon had spotted the storm, too, and she was in the process of explaining that she thought they were only a few miles offshore of Pole Island when a huge wave struck the boat, sending the prow almost vertical before dropping it again, slamming the hull into the ocean’s surface.

Emily screamed and clung on to the wheel as it suddenly seemed to gain a life all its own. Rhiannon and Thor both squealed in unison and slipped across the floor toward the back of the cabin. Rhiannon managed to grab the back of a chair and steady herself, but Thor collided with the rear wall and yelped in pain and fright.

“Hold on,” yelled Emily as another wave lifted them sideways, then deposited them unceremoniously down again with a thunderous splash. Thor skidded back toward the front of the cabin, his paws scrambling for grip but finding no purchase on the plastic floor. He collided squarely with the back of Emily’s calves, buckling her knees and sending her toppling astern, her hands slipping off the metal of the boat’s wheel. She slid backward and collided with the bottom edge of a seat, yelling in pain as, even through the layers of cold-weather gear, the plastic cut painfully across her shoulders.

Rhiannon looked mortified. She clung to her chair like a life preserver as the boat bucked and thrashed, hitting wave after wave, the wheel spinning wildly back and forth.

“Tie yourself down,” Emily yelled to Rhiannon, pointing to the black safety belt that hung limply from the seat as she crawled her way back toward the captain’s chair. Rhiannon dragged herself into the seat and grabbed the safety belt, clicking it into place as she gripped the base of the chair with both hands as tightly as she could.

Emily reached out for the support that fixed the captain’s chair to the deck and grabbed it. She looked back toward the back of the cabin for Thor; he was scrambling toward her. She grabbed the big dog’s collar and heaved him toward her, sliding the terrified dog over the floor. When she was sure she had a firm grip, she pulled Thor up to her and then pushed him into the space between the seat support and the flat of the boat’s control console, jamming him in as best she could. When he was safe, she pulled herself to her feet and flung herself into the captain’s seat. She jammed her feet under Thor’s belly so he couldn’t move and quickly fastened her own seat belt into place. Then she grabbed the wheel and glanced at the compass; the boat was now heading west.

“Shit!” Emily turned the wheel, fighting the rogue waves as they tried to force the boat in the direction they wanted to take it. She thrust the throttle forward until it would go no farther. The boat instantly swung around, the engines thrusting them up the front of another wave and through it this time, rather than over. She couldn’t see anything through the haze of water kicked up by the speeding boat as it sliced the ocean apart.

Emily glanced down at the control panel, located the switch she was looking for, and pushed it. The two large wipers began throwing the water off the glass windshield, and within seconds she could see clearly again.

Ahead of them, not more than a quarter mile away, appearing out of the spray like Avalon from the mist, was the shadowy outline of land.

CHAPTER TWENTY-NINE

Emily could see a fragile-looking wooden dock sticking out from a shale beach that sloped down to meet the crashing waves.

She fought the wheel and used what little strength she still had left to turn it until the prow of the boat was heading toward it. The waves were still roaring in fast and hard, smashing against the side of the boat, and she could feel the current trying to drag them away from the rapidly approaching beach. She was half-tempted to reduce the boat’s speed to the minimum needed to make headway and plant the boat, pointy end first, into the shale of the beach. It looked deep enough to slow them.

But Jacob had warned her that this boat was their only way to escape off the island when the time came. If she damaged it, there was no guarantee they had the tools or expertise to fix it. Or worse still, she might plant the boat in the shale and sink the damn thing, or it could even be swept out to sea, and them along with it, with no way to beach it.

No, she was going to have to try to bring it in alongside the jetty and secure it.

Here we go again, she thought as she eased the throttle down and tried to judge the best angle to reach the dock safely.

The boat pitched hard to the left, scraping the front side along the wooden dock, cracking a plank and sending the pieces flying through the air. Emily resisted the urge to turn the wheel all the way to the right, which would just send the back end crashing into the dock, too; this needed finesse.

The swell was not as strong this close to the shore, but the waves were hitting more frequently, so she needed to constantly adjust the boat’s attitude. She eased the throttle to just above the “stop” marker and angled the front of the boat slightly away from the side of the dock as the beach drew rapidly closer.

“Slow down, damn you,” she hissed through clenched teeth. “Slow. The. Fuck. Down.”

Now she was just a passenger.

The boat gave a final lurch forward, then stopped, bobbing like a fishing float on the ocean’s surface, a few feet from the edge of the dock.

Close enough, she judged.

Emily unfastened her seat belt and ran to the back of the cabin. Flinging open the door, she grabbed the mooring rope from the deck and launched herself over the side of the boat before it could drift any farther away. She landed on the jetty and ran to the nearby mooring bollard, unreeling the rope behind her.

How the hell was she supposed to tie this thing off so it wouldn’t float away?

The cold wind beat against her and spray from the sea soaked her unprotected head with freezing water, sending stinging droplets of salt water into her eyes. If she stood there much longer she was going to either freeze or get blown into the water and drown. Emily strained against the rope, pulling as hard as she could to get the boat closer to the shore. She looped the end of the rope around the metal bollard and then tied it off the only way she knew how, with a bow. It might look weird, but at least she knew it was a secure knot…and it added a little panache, too. A win-win situation if you asked her.

She leaped carefully back onto the deck of the boat, slipping on the wet surface, before opening the door to the cabin. She could hear the engines still idling, barely audible against the crashing of the waves against the shore and the wind that whipped past the cabin.

Inside she pressed the same red button she had to start the engines and felt rather than heard the purr of the engines slowly die away.

Emily turned to Rhiannon and just looked at her. It was as if the whole world had suddenly stopped rotating. Here she was, how many days and how many thousands of miles later?

She was finally here.

It felt as though she had been holding her breath from the moment she had first seen the red rain fall that fateful day.

A sense of peace, almost serenity, washed over her.

“Grab your stuff,” Emily said finally. “We’re almost home.”

“Just your backpack for now,” Emily told Rhiannon. “We’ll come back for the rest of the supplies tomorrow, when we have some extra pairs of hands.”

Rhiannon nodded and placed the backpack over her shoulders. “I’ll take Thor,” she said.

Emily was confident her knot would hold the boat in place, but she was only leaving nonessential food supplies behind just in case she was wrong. From what Jacob had told her, the research team had more than enough to last if the worst should happen and the boat was swept away or the supplies were damaged. Emily grabbed the key from the ignition and secured it in her jacket pocket.

“Ready?” she asked as she swung her backpack up onto her shoulders and slipped the flashlight into the side pocket.

The smile pasted across Rhiannon’s face was answer enough. Emily swung open the door and held it open. The cabin was instantly filled with spray driven in by the wind. Rhiannon slipped past Emily and leaped up onto the dock.

Having traveled the majority of the last eight days or so in comparative luxury to the bike ride that had started her journey, Emily was not surprised at how heavy the backpack felt as she made her way to the back of the boat.

“Come on, Thor,” the girl called from the dock. The dog followed her obediently, leaping across the space between the dock and the boat as though it were nonexistent. He stood next to Rhiannon, waiting for Emily to join them, the fur of his gray coat ruffling and flying in the wind, his eyes crinkled against the constant ocean spray.

Once Emily was safely on the dock, the three new arrivals to the island began walking the seventy feet or so to land. The wooden dock extended up the beach before abutting up against a roughly constructed concrete path that, judging from the cracks and missing chunks, had seen better days. The concrete path wound up the rising beach and disappeared between two mounds of shale.

As they reached the top of the path, Emily saw a cluster of buildings in the distance. A pole with a blinking red light atop it jutted into the air at the center of the camp.

“Why does only one of them have lights on?” asked Rhiannon, referring to the slivers of orange light they could see seeping from the windows of the largest of the buildings.

“They are probably trying to conserve power,” Emily replied, struggling to be heard over the wind that seemed intent on blowing them off the island.

At least they knew in which building they would find Jacob and the team now, she thought as they angled off the path toward the light.

On the eastern side of the building, Emily could see a heavy metal door set slightly back in a recessed alcove. At the door’s center was a large metal wheel.

Emily took the wheel in both hands and twisted it. It turned freely, squeaking loudly as it rotated. There was a dull metallic clunk, and the door opened slightly.

“Inside,” she said to Rhiannon and Thor, pulling the door wide enough for them all to slip through and then pulling it closed again behind them. There was a second wheel on the inside, and she spun that until the door closed securely.

They found themselves inside a room; it was small, about twelve feet in length with hooks on either wall from which hung cold-weather gear. A dim light set in the ceiling illuminated a set of wooden benches running low along the walls, and beneath those were several pairs of boots.

A second door at the opposite end of the room had a simple lever to open it.

Emily pulled the door open and stepped through into a larger room with scattered tables, seats, and a set of metal lockers on the right. A coffeepot—empty—sat on a desk next to a tray of plastic mugs and condiments. A refrigerator hummed next to it.

The room was deserted, but a corridor, with several thick pipes running along the ceiling, extended off from the room to her left, disappearing in an abrupt right turn farther along.

“Hello,” she called out. “Is there anybody here?”

From somewhere along the corridor the sound of a door opening was accompanied by a ringing harmony of voices and music. The Beach Boys, “California Girls,” if I’m not mistaken, Emily thought. The music stopped. Either the door had been closed again or someone had switched off the music.

“Hello?” she called again. “It’s Emily and Rhiannon. We’re…here.”

“And Thor,” said Rhiannon as she stroked the dog’s head. “Don’t forget Thor.”

Another sound reached them now: a high-pitched squeak, then a slight pause followed by another squeak, slowly getting louder as it approached them. Thor’s head tilted slightly, his ears perking up as an unsure growl bubbled up from his throat.

“Shush,” Emily chided him. “It’s okay, boy.”

A man, roughly thirty Emily guessed, with a neatly trimmed dark-brown beard and a pair of glasses perched on his nose appeared from around the corner of the corridor.

He stopped for a moment and stared at the three visitors.

Thor gave another uncertain growl but quieted at the touch of Emily’s hand on his head.

“Hello, Emily. Hello, Rhiannon,” said the stranger, a smile breaking across his pale face as he rolled his wheelchair into the room. “I’m Jacob, and it is so very nice to finally meet you both in person.”

CHAPTER THIRTY

The wheelchair was a surprise to Emily.

Jacob had never mentioned anything about being disabled. But then why would he? It was hardly relevant.

Emily had imagined how this moment would be, this first meeting between them. She had a little speech ready, but she found herself unable to speak a word of it. Instead she walked over to him, placed her arms gently around his neck, and whispered into his ear, “Thank you,” soaking the collar of his shirt with the tears that had begun to flow even before she had taken a step.

Rhiannon joined them for the group hug; even Thor came over and gave Jacob an exploratory sniff.

“Let’s get you out of that gear,” he said after Emily and Rhia finally broke away. “Maybe you’d like a shower or something to eat?”

“I’d love to meet the rest of your team,” Emily replied.

“Of course, but why don’t I get you to your room first? You can freshen up and then we’ll deal with that. Okay?”

“Sure,” Emily replied with a smile. He was politely letting them know that they smelled worse than a week-old dead cat, she realized. “Lead the way.”

Jacob accompanied them from the first room, Emily on one side of the wheelchair and Rhiannon on the other. “This is my room,” he said, indicating a door on the right of the corridor. “And these two are yours. I assumed you wouldn’t mind having a room apiece?”

Emily welcomed the idea of some privacy, but she worried about Rhiannon. The two of them had been sharing the same space for so long now, she wasn’t sure whether the girl would be reticent about being alone. That concern disappeared as she watched Rhia disappear inside the room with her bag. “See you later,” she said, smiling from the doorway.

“When you’re done, just head down the corridor to your right. The first big room on your left is the meeting room.”

Rhiannon nodded to Jacob and disappeared inside, leaving the two adults alone in the corridor.

“I’d better get freshened up.”

“And I’ll go rustle up some dinner for you guys. You must be starving.”

Thirty minutes later there was a quiet knock on Emily’s door.

“Can I come in?” asked Rhiannon.

Emily pulled the sweater she had just removed from the backpack over her head and reached for the door handle. She had forgotten just how pretty Rhiannon was; the girl had been hidden under layers of clothes and grime for so long now. Standing in the doorway was a girl transformed. Her long blonde hair fell freely over her shoulder, newly washed and shiny. She had on a pair of loose blue jogging pants and a turtleneck sweater and the biggest smile she had ever seen from the kid.

“They have a hair dryer,” she whispered, as though it was the greatest discovery of her young life. Emily understood. After stepping out of the shower, she had luxuriated in the feeling of the hot air of her own dryer.

“You look beautiful,” she told the girl. Rhia blushed at the compliment.

“Well, I think it’s time we went and introduced ourselves to everyone, don’t you?”

Rhiannon nodded in excitement.

Thor was laying on the bed, his head over the edge, tail thumping against the sheets.

“Come on,” she told the malamute. “Let’s go do this.”

Jacob was waiting in the meeting room for the new arrivals. On the table in the center of the room were two plates with metal warming covers to keep the food hot. A pitcher of water and another of orange juice rested nearby, with a complement of glasses and cutlery.

“I saved something special for Thor,” said Jacob, and he reached for a bowl of what looked like chopped beef roast, placing it on the floor for the dog, who began devouring the food with his usual gusto.

“Quite the appetite,” remarked Jacob.

Emily lifted the cover off her plate and revealed a burger between two buns. There was a side of lettuce and onions, along with a couple of packets of ketchup and mayonnaise.

“I didn’t know if you liked lettuce on your burger or not, but I did assume you wanted cheese,” he continued, beckoning to Rhiannon to join him at the table. “Enjoy.”

“Oh my God,” Rhiannon said after taking her first bite of the burger. A look of utter bliss swept across her face. Here was a girl who had found nirvana.

Emily couldn’t help herself, she laughed, spraying a fine mist of her own burger—which was as delicious as she had imagined it would be—over the table.

Rhiannon choked down her own bite of the burger and coughed. “Sorry,” she said, snickering.

“Wow! What a great first impression we’ve made,” laughed Emily after she swallowed her food. “Sorry about that, it’s just the tension…This is just all such a relief.”

Jacob joined them in their laughter, raising both hands in a gesture of détente. “Not a problem at all, ladies.”

They ate the rest of the food in silence, savoring the flavors and the full feeling as their stomachs began to process the burgers. It was the first real food they had eaten since leaving Stuyvesant.

“That was delicious,” said Emily after finishing. “Thank you.”

“You’re more than welcome. There’s dessert. Parfaits, if you would like one?” Rhiannon nodded her head enthusiastically; Emily declined. Jacob wheeled himself over to a small refrigerator and pulled out a plastic container of parfait, complete with a disposable plastic spoon attached to the lid. “Sure I can’t tempt you?” he asked Emily.

“No. Thanks. I think I’ll pass.”

Rhiannon eagerly dug into the plastic cup of fruit and cream. She devoured it with the same look of bliss she had while eating the burger. The two adults sat back and watched, enjoying the child’s pure joy.

Finally, Emily spoke. “Thank you so much for that. I honestly don’t know what either of us would have done without you, Jacob. We would have…well…I guess we would have been lost without you.”

“I’m just glad you’re here, safe and sound,” he replied.

“So, do you think we can meet the rest of your team?” she asked, smiling in anticipation.

Jacob bit his bottom lip for a second, dropping his eyes to his immobile feet. When he raised them again, it was to meet Emily’s expectant gaze.

“There is nobody else,” he said finally.

“What? I’m sorry. What did you say?”

“There is nobody else,” he repeated. “It’s just me.”

CHAPTER THIRTY-ONE

There. Is. Nobody. Else.

Even when she sounded them out individually, the words just did not fit together as a sentence. They didn’t seem to want to stay still in Emily’s brain long enough for her to rationalize what Jacob really meant by them. They kept sliding around, bouncing off of each other, refusing to form any recognizable meaning.

“What?” she repeated for the third or fourth time.

“I know you’re probably confused, and I know you’re probably very upset, but I just need you to hear me out, okay? I need you to understand why I had to do what I did.”

Emily couldn’t quite fathom what he was saying. “But you said you had a team. What about your team?”

“They left, not long after the rain began. They wanted to head back to Fairbanks and check it out. I volunteered to stay to keep the place running. They said they would be back. They never came back.”

Emily thought about the convoy full of dead people on the road to Fairbanks and the murdered men and women she had found in Deadhorse. Could any of them have been a part of Jacob’s team? she wondered.

She glanced over at Rhiannon. Her mouth was agape as she stared hard at Jacob. “Emily?” she asked. “What does he mean?” Her voice cracked with uncertainty.

“I don’t know, sweetheart. But why don’t you come on over here beside me while we figure this out?” She patted the seat next to her. The sound of the chair scraping across the floor as Rhiannon jumped to her feet and ran to Emily’s side was grating in the suddenly painful silence filling the room. “Good girl,” she said, placing a reassuring hand on the kid’s knee as she took the chair next to Emily.

Jacob began to wheel his chair over to where the two women sat. “I really can expl—”

Emily jumped to her feet. “Stay right where you are,” she bellowed. “Do not fucking come anywhere near us.”

Jacob froze, a look of utter horror crossing his face.

Thor, who had been dozing quietly under the table, was suddenly at Emily’s side. He sat down next to her, his eyes focused on Jacob.

Jacob swallowed hard and backed up from the trio, very aware of Thor’s silent lupine gaze. “I had no choice,” he said after a pause, his voice as calm and soothing as it had been during their countless telephone conversations. “If I had told you I was here alone, would you have come?”

Emily didn’t answer.

“No, of course you wouldn’t. You would have thought I was some kind of nut job, and you wouldn’t have come here. You would have just stayed in your apartment and waited. And you would have died.”

Rhiannon began to quietly cry, fat tears trickling over her cheeks and staining the front of her jogging pants. Emily switched her arm from the child’s knee and wrapped it around her shoulder, never taking her eyes off Jacob.

“I told the team not to leave,” he continued. “I warned them that they should stay. But they had families, wives, mothers, kids. Someone had to stay. Someone had to. But I knew. I knew that they wouldn’t be coming back.” His voice had taken on a tone of sadness, maybe even mixed with frustration. “When I found you, Emily, I knew I couldn’t tell you I was here alone, so I lied. I’m sorry, but I had to try to save you.”

“And what about your wife? Sandra, wasn’t it? She was supposed to be back at Fairbanks University. Was any of that true?”

Jacob could not meet her gaze. He chose to stare at his feet and shake his head in answer.

“You risked mine and Rhiannon’s life to try to save your own skin? Is what you did?” she yelled, suddenly on her feet, her voice livid with anger. “You brought us all the way here to rescue you? You fucking piece of shit.” Emily’s words hit Jacob like hammer blows; she could see him physically reeling as each word struck home.

Good!

“You were stranded here, and you needed us to come and rescue you? All that…that sanctimonious posturing about wanting to save me, it’s just bullshit you use to convince yourself that you were doing the right thing, isn’t it? Answer me, goddamn you!”

Emily had to admit, the look of hurt on his face was good. He actually believes what he said, she thought. She shook her head at him in complete disbelief.

“Wow! Just wow.”

Rhiannon threw her arms around Emily’s waist, sinking her head deeper into her shoulder as she sobbed. Emily could feel the dampness of Rhia’s tears seeping through the material of her sweater.

Jacob took a deep breath, composing himself, then spoke. His voice was level and clear, free of any hint of anger. “Yes, you’re somewhat right. I did want you to come and rescue me, but it was an added benefit. I have enough food here to last me a year, probably a lot longer. But most of all I wanted to help you, Emily. You were the only person I knew for certain was still alive, and I wanted to save you. I didn’t make anything else up. Everything I told you about traveling north was true. You’ve seen that for yourself. I did not lie to you about any of that.”

Emily bent in and kissed the crying girl on the forehead. “It’s okay. It’s okay,” she said, not sure if she was trying to convince Rhiannon or herself. What was she supposed to believe? There was no doubt that he was not lying about the cold holding back the spread of the alien infestation, but everything else had the thin veneer of pretense to it. How was she supposed to trust him? Where was she supposed to go? Where could she go? God! She thought she had left all the pain and stress behind her when they’d stepped onto the island. Instead, she was handed a whole new package of BS.

“You had me riding a fucking bike here, Jacob,” she whispered, her voice heavy with disappointment as the anger began to seep away, replaced by a feeling of emptiness.

Jacob pushed his wheelchair closer to the two girls. “Look,” he said, keeping his voice low. “I know I screwed up by not telling you, and I am truly sorry. But you’re here now. You are safe, and I know we can make a go of this. We can figure it all out. I promise you.”

Emily had, at least until today, always considered herself a good judge of character. It was something she had honed over the course of her career as a journalist, an essential tool that had served her well. She looked up from Rhiannon and met Jacob’s eyes. There was no cruelty there. No deceit. Fear? Yes. Regret? Maybe.

“I’m sorry,” he said finally.

From somewhere else in the building a buzzing hissing sound filtered through the still air. It sounded like the static that flowed between AM radio stations. The buzzing became louder, then dropped away, then returned a little stronger as the static finally resolved into a garbled human voice.

“This is ZzzZZZzz HM ZzzzzzZZzzzz ZzzzZZZzzzz. Do yo zzZzzZZzz me?”

All three occupants of the room looked up. A look of stunned disbelief crossed over Jacob’s face, and Emily was sure her own face had the same look of astonishment.

It was a man’s voice but Emily could only make out the occasional word through the buzz of the interference.

“Who’s that?” asked Rhiannon, wiping away the tears and snot from her face with the back of her hands. As if in answer to her question, there was another burst of static, then the man’s voice boomed loud and clear down the hallway.

“This is Captain Edward Constantine of her Majesty’s Royal Navy submarine HMS Vengeance. Do you read me?”

Emily continued to stare at Jacob, unsure of whether she should trust him or just shoot him. Finally, she took a deep breath and spoke.

“Show me where your radio room is.”