“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 some
one 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.
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.
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