Exodus (32 page)

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.