The Cherokee was roomy enough for all four of them and their carry-on bags, which they tossed into the spacious back section. Todd started out driving, though Fred Wilkinson offered to split the trip with him, and Kate Jansen sat in the passenger seat to work the heater and the radio (and, she added with a sly wink, to keep Todd company so he wouldn’t fall asleep and run them all off the road).
The Wilkinsons were a pleasant enough couple. Fred was a veterinarian who owned his own practice in Atlanta. Well-groomed and well-spoken, he was the type of man Todd would have hoped his own father might have been, instead of the pathetic societal drain that he was. Fred Wilkinson’s wife, Nan, was a grade-school teacher who also taught aerobics on the weekends. She possessed the lean, sinewy body of a dancer and, despite her close-cropped silvery hair, looked much younger than her sixty-odd years. They were on their way to spend Christmas with their daughter Rebecca just outside Des Moines—a tradition they’d maintained, according to Nan, for many years. “She’s married to a cardiologist,” Nan said, “and they’ve been hinting at a special Christmas gift this year. Fred and I think they’re planning to announce a forthcoming addition to the family.” Todd surveyed them both as they climbed into the backseat of the Cherokee, silently thankful that they both seemed to be in exceptional
health for their age. The last thing he wanted was for one of them to suffer a heart attack during the excursion to Des Moines.
The driving started out bad and only got worse. The sky was already dark by the time they turned out of the rental car garage, but at least the roadway leading to the interstate had been recently plowed. The snow swirled down in tornado clusters, rushing at the Cherokee’s windshield and spiraling in the cones of light issuing from the headlamps. Not surprisingly, they were just about the only vehicle on the road. The interstate narrowed and cut through a vast pine valley, with great heaping snowbanks studded with black firs rising up on either side of them. The occasional set of headlights passing them on the opposite side of the road were reminders that civilization was, indeed, still out there.
Two hours into the trip, Fred Wilkinson was sawing wood in the backseat with his head craned back on his neck. Nan was slouched against her husband’s chest, sleeping in her own silent way. They had been playing solitaire only twenty minutes earlier, giggling like two schoolchildren while Nan accused her husband of being a dirty old cheater. The cards now lay splayed in their laps, forgotten.
In the passenger seat, Kate was adjusting the radio, hoping to locate a station strong enough to struggle through the storm and make contact. She was having little luck. Finally, she managed to come upon an oldies station and settled for Little Anthony and the Imperials crooning through the static.
“So what’s your son’s name?” Kate asked, settling back in her seat.
“Justin. He’s seven.”
“You got a picture of him?”
He propped himself up on one buttock and fished his wallet out from the back pocket of his jeans. “In here,” he said, tossing the wallet into Kate’s lap.
She opened his wallet and examined the catalog of tiny pictures housed in their little plastic sleeves. “He’s adorable,” she said. “Does he look more like you or your wife?”
“Ex-wife,” he said automatically. “Most people think he looks like me. But that was when he was younger. He looks like his own person now.”
She flipped through more photographs. “And he lives permanently in Des Moines, huh?”
“Permanently. With his mother.”
“That must suck, what with you living in New York.”
He shot her a curious look, then turned back to the highway. “How’d you know I live in New York?”
She held up his wallet. “Driver’s license.”
“Ah. Very industrious of you.”
She turned to the last picture and a folded length of stiff paper eased out of the wallet and into Kate’s lap. “Whoops,” she said, scooping it up. “Wallet contents abandon ship.” She picked up the folded bit of paper and was about to stuff it back into the wallet when she noticed the dried bloodstains on it.
“What’s this?”
Todd knew what it was just from glancing at it through the periphery of his vision: a horse-racing form. The dried blood on it was his. He reached over and plucked it out of her hand.
“It’s a reminder,” he said.
“Was that blood?”
He said nothing.
“I’m sorry. It just fell out.”
“Don’t worry about it.” He stuffed the form into the breast pocket of his coat. On the radio, Little Anthony and the Imperials were replaced by The Guess Who. Intermittent bursts of static cut through the song.
Perhaps in an effort to change subjects, Kate turned and looked out the passenger window. “Snow’s letting up.”
“It’s been slowing down for the past twenty minutes or so…which is a good thing, because we’re making shitty time.”
“And the road’s beginning to disappear.”
“Yeah,” he said, a hard lump in his throat.
For the past several minutes, the thin white powder that had covered the blacktop had increased substantially; now, the pavement was completely gone, hidden beneath a hard-packed blanket of pure white snow several inches thick. The driving had become more treacherous and Todd could feel the steering wheel pulling all over the place as the Cherokee advanced through the worsening terrain.
“I don’t see any more tire tracks,” Kate marveled, peering through the front windshield now. Then, echoing Todd’s thoughts from earlier, she added, “We must be the only fools out driving on a night like this.”
“Don’t remind me,” he said, hoping he sounded more lighthearted than he felt.
The roadway seemed to narrow to one lane just up ahead, the snow encroaching on it from either side. The Cherokee bucked and groaned and, once, scraped its undercarriage against an undulation of packed snow. Todd slowed the vehicle down to a cool forty-five. The tires spun freely, then caught and pulled the Cherokee along.
“Check the map,” he said to Kate. “Make sure we’re still on the main road.”
“I never saw a sign to get off,” she said, unfolding the map across her thighs. “I can’t even see the mile markers out there. They’re buried under the snow.”
“We’ve just been going straight. I can’t imagine how…”
Todd paused. He leaned farther over the steering wheel, squinting at a brief flare of reflective light he thought he’d caught up ahead in the darkness. But it was a fleeting glare, there and then gone.
“What?” Kate said. “What is it?”
“Thought I saw something.”
She leaned forward in her seat, too. “What kind of something?”
“A road sign. At least, I
think
it—”
“There!” Kate said, as excited as a schoolgirl.
“Yeah. I see it, too.”
It was one of those standard green roadside signs with the luminous white letters, and it came sliding out of the snow-covered pines like an apparition. The moonlight caused the white letters to glow.
“Civilization,” Kate breathed, the relief in her voice so evident it was nearly comical. “Thank God.”
“No exit number,” Todd said.
“There’s a Woodson on the map,” Kate said. “It looks like it’s just off the main highway. Which means we’re in Iowa already.”
“Christ. I don’t remember seeing a sign entering Iowa, either. Do you?”
“No…but it was snowing pretty hard until now. Maybe we missed it.”
The Cherokee bucked and whined. Todd eased it down to thirty-five. Glancing up in the rearview and beyond the snoring portrait of Fred Wilkinson, the world had vanished into heaps of white snow and, beyond the snow, infinite blackness. The moon was a blazing silver scythe in the sky.
“Todd!” Kate’s hand clamped down on his arm. He jerked his eyes back to the road just as a shape—indistinct except for the fact that it had been undeniably human—shuffled into the swell of black pines off the right shoulder of the road. Kate’s grip tightened on his arm. “Did you see it?”
“A man,” he said.
“Are you—”
Suddenly, the figure was in the middle of the road, only a few yards in front of them as if he had materialized out of thin air. Kate made a sound like a small dog and Todd slammed on the brakes. The brakes locked and the Cherokee plowed forward, sliding effortlessly on the ice-capped snow. The man stood as still as a frightened deer, the vehicle’s oncoming headlights seeming to drain all color from his face. A man in a black- and red-checkered flannel coat and high boots, mid-forties, bearded, pale—
“Jesus, Todd!”
He jerked the wheel to the left and felt nothing. Then he overcompensated to the right and instantly knew it was a bad move: the Cherokee fishtailed until it was running perpendicular, the headlights now illuminating the high bank of packed snow along the right shoulder of the road. For two split seconds, the world ceased to make sense. Then, miraculously, the Cherokee somehow righted itself and faced forward again, though not perfectly centered on the roadway as it had been before. Todd could no longer see the man in the red and black coat and was overcome by a sudden, nauseating certainty that he had run over him. Then the right front bumper slammed into a snowdrift, smashing out the right headlamp and causing the Cherokee to shudder to a stop.
White-knuckled, Todd clenched the steering wheel. Beside him, Kate was running her fingers through her hair and repeating, “Oh, God,” over and over again like a mantra. In the backseat, Fred Wilkinson scrambled to sit up straight, one hand pawing stupidly at the side window.
“Everyone okay?” Todd managed. He sounded like he was talking into an electric fan.
“What the hell happened?” Fred’s voice was equally shaken.
“There was a man in the road,” he told Fred. “I think…I
think…”
“No,” Kate said. Her hand had returned to his arm, much more tenderly this time. “You didn’t hit him. He moved.”
“Did you
see
him move?”
“A
man?”
Fred sounded incredulous.
“You didn’t hit him,” Kate said again, as if repeating it would make it fact. “We would have…would have
felt
it if…if you…” Amazingly, she uttered a nervous laugh. A sprig of red curls had come loose from under her wool cap and dangled down her left temple.
“We’re okay,” Nan piped up, speaking for both herself and her husband. “You’re okay, aren’t you, Fred?”
“Sure,” Fred said, calming down. “Wish I would have thought to buy some extra undies at the duty-free shop, though…” He cleared his throat, then said, “A
man
out there, did you say?”
“Yeah, Fred. Yeah.”
Their nervous, mingled breathing had fogged the windows. Todd could see nothing except the dull tallow glow of the remaining headlamp cutting through the darkness outside. He exchanged a look with Kate, then popped open the driver’s side door.
The cold attacked him mercilessly the second he stepped from the vehicle. He hugged his coat around himself, stuffing his bare hands beneath his armpits. Something was hissing beneath the Cherokee’s hood, causing vapor to billow up in a cloud from the grille where it practically froze into crystals in the freezing night air. Todd afforded it no more than a cursory glance—the right front corner was wedged into the snowdrift, of all luck—before stepping out into the middle of the roadway.
He expected to see a black ribbon of blood snaking through the packed snow, perhaps one of those high forester
boots strewn off to one side. Entrails, even. But the road was clear, the snow unblemished except for the double helix carved into it from the Cherokee’s fishtailing tires.
“Hello?” he called out…though he could hardly muster more than a pitiful croak.
“Todd?” Kate said, coming up behind him. Her breath clouded the air like great bursts of magnolia blossoms. She placed a tentative hand on his right shoulder. “Todd?”
“Hello!” he yelled, much louder this time. His voice boomed and echoed down the canyon of snow.
A shape moved in the darkness up ahead, red in the glow of the Cherokee’s taillights.
Kate’s hand became a claw digging into Todd’s shoulder. He thought he could feel her heartbeat vibrating through it.
The shape staggered out into the middle of the snow-covered roadway, bloodred in the taillights’ illumination. He moved like something out of a George Romero film, and although Todd was relieved to see the man unharmed, this relief was instantly followed by an unanchored sense of animal dread. One winter when he was thirteen years old, he’d been skating with some friends on a frozen pond behind the church. Before anyone knew what had happened, one of the kids—a chunky, poorly coordinated boy named Bernie Hambert—had vanished. He’d broken through the ice and plunged straight down into the black, inky water. He’d left only a single glove behind, a five-fingered starfish on the ice. There had been adults nearby who ushered them all off the lake, then risked their own lives creeping out toward the hole in the ice in an effort to save poor Bernie. Amazingly, one of the adults had managed to reach in and simply snag ahold of Bernie’s ski jacket and yank him up through the hole in the ice. The kid was sopping wet, his skin the color of carbon paper, his teeth rattling like maracas in his head. The second he hit the air, frost began to form on his clothes and even,
Todd remembered with horror, on his
skin.
One of the adults draped a coat over the boy’s quaking shoulders. When Bernie Hambert followed the adults off the ice and to the safety of solid ground, he’d walked with an uncertain Frankenstein gait, a sort of lumbering toddler walk that conveyed to all the other kids watching from the snowdrift that this had been serious business. That he could have
died
down there, for Christ’s sake, under the ice.
Todd thought of Bernie Hambert now as he watched the man in the red and black flannel coat shuffle toward him. He had that same disoriented Frankenstein gait Todd remembered so clearly from that day at the frozen pond.
“Sir?” Despite his unease, Todd approached the man. “Are you hurt?”
The man froze as Todd came up to him. His eyes were as rheumy as a drunkard’s, the lower lids rimmed in red, and his complexion was a mottled cobalt hue, networked with delicate spidery veins. His cheeks were deep divots and the lower portion of his face was covered in a lumberjack’s beard caked with ice.