“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 slippe
d 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.”
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.
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