Exodus (34 page)

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: U
NIVERSITY OF
A
LASKA
F
AIRBANKS
—C
LIMATE
R
ESEARCH
.

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: E
NGINE
S
TART
.

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.

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.