Emily panned the light left, then back to the right again, but even the powerful beam of the spotlight could not penetrate very deeply into the bank of mist. There was nothing else for it; she was going to have to get out and see what kind of room there was for her to maneuver.
Shit! If this tanker blocked the entire road, they were screwed. They would have to head back to Fairbanks and figure out some other way to get to Jacob’s location.
“Stay here,” she said to Rhiannon. “And lock the door behind me.” Emily saw the look of fear spread over the young girl’s face at the thought of being left alone. “Don’t worry,” she told her. “I just need to look around. Besides, Thor will keep you company. Won’t you, boy?” Thor laid his muzzle on the center console between the two front seats and whined quietly, his tail beating a subdued rhythm against the upholstery.
“I’ll be right back,” she continued as she manipulated the floodlight until it illuminated the majority of the length of the trailer. It would give her some light at least.
She pulled on her parka and zipped it up tight before slipping the hood over her head. The shotgun was hard to handle with the thick gloves, but she took it anyway. Emily opened the door quickly and stepped outside before the heat of the cabin could escape. Slamming it shut, she saw white condensation begin to collect on the window. She tapped the glass and mouthed “Lock. The. Door” to the wide-eyed Rhiannon. She waited until she saw her reach across and click the lock into place, then turned and maneuvered carefully along the ice-covered access gantry, stepped down onto the front track, and hopped the last few feet down onto the snow-covered road. The snow was less than a foot deep here, she noted, as her boots sank down into it with a crunch like dry autumn leaves.
Through the narrow vision of the hood of her parka, Emily could make out the cold steel of the tanker ahead of her. She crunched over to it and leaned a gloved hand against it as she oriented herself with the light from the Cat. Even through the thick pads of her glove, she could feel the cold of the frigid metal permeating to the tips of her fingers.
The mist reduced visibility down to about fifteen feet; her own breath added to it as it swirled around her. She moved as close as she dared to the cab. The rock-strewn curb leading over the edge had no guardrail to protect drivers from the plunge to the valley below. It was probably best to stay back from the edge—the lip of the road looked loose and crumbly. No point putting herself in danger; besides, the driver’s cabin was too far over for her to reach, anyway.
Doubling back, Emily followed the trailer toward its rear, walking carefully alongside it. Ten steps beyond that and the truck had completely disappeared from view. The panic that flooded her system was almost paralyzing. Getting lost out there, with no visual cues to orient herself by, could be deadly. Panicking, on the other hand, would be disastrous.
Breathe, she told herself. Just breathe.
She looked down at the snow; the outline of her tracks, crisp and fresh, were easily visible. Unless it started snowing again, they would act as bread crumbs. All she would need to do was follow them back to the Cat.
She started walking again, measuring each step as she watched for some indication of the end of the road. Five more steps and she could just begin to make out a dim form through the mist; another step and the edge of the road materialized, flanked by an embankment that rose up above her before disappearing into the mist. The embankment, an almost sheer face of rock, was too steep for even the multitracked Cat to climb, but she was pretty sure that if she was careful, she could slip the Cat through the space between it and the back end of the tanker. The Cat was about nine feet wide, and she had marked off about sixteen feet from the end of the tanker to the embankment. If she took it slow, they would be okay.
Emily turned to retrace her steps back to the vehicle as a gust of wind swept down from farther up the hill, buffeting and jostling her as she followed her footprints back the way she had come. A sudden, powerful crosswind pummeled her back, sending a flurry of blinding snow into the air. Off balance and disoriented by the sudden pounding wind, Emily fell forward, arms windmilling and then disappearing into the snow up to her elbows. The wind continued to buffet her even as she tried to struggle back to her feet. Every time she managed to raise herself to her knees, another gust of wind would knock her down again. It was futile to try and fight against it, she realized after her third attempt. Instead, she sank back to the ground and pulled her legs up to her chest, dipping her head down to her knees to limit the amount of cold air that could be blown into the hood of the parka. She’d just have to wait until the wind died down rather than risk being blown over the edge of the road.
Seconds dragged into minutes as she was rocked back and forth; clumps of snow lifted from the embankment face, bouncing off the protective coating of the jacket. In the darkness of her hood, the wind sounded like a wolf, baying for her blood.
Slowly, the wind began to die away. When she was quite sure it had stopped, she slowly lifted her head from her knees and looked around. The mist had disappeared, too, dragged away by the wind and revealing the rest of the road as it wound down the hill.
“Oh, shit!” The expletive tumbled from her mouth as she struggled to her feet and pulled the hood from her sweat-soaked head, oblivious to the chill.
Stretching out below her, lining almost every foot of the road, was a procession of frozen vehicles winding the remaining two miles to the bottom of the hill.
To Emily, as she gazed out over the line of trucks, flatbeds, snowplows, tankers, Sno-Cats, and even a snowmobile or two, it seemed as though she had stumbled across some long-lost convoy.
It looked like they had been moving in formation together. Maybe they had been evacuating from the oil fields of Prudhoe Bay when the red rain caught them out in the open? The majority of the dead vehicles consisted of either heavy-goods or commercial-size transportation, suggesting they must have come from one of the support sites that supplied materials and assistance to the oil rigs that plundered the Arctic. Maybe these were even from Deadhorse?
Her own Cat was just fifty feet away, its engine billowing plumes of exhaust into the air. She could see Rhiannon, her nose pressed against the glass of the cab, staring at her and then at the snaking trail of frozen metal glinting in the sunlight.
Emily motioned to her that she was okay—not so easy to do when your hands are hidden in gloves. But she was a smart kid; she could figure out that she was all right.
The jackknifed big rig that had caused them to stop was the lead vehicle of the convoy. Behind that was another rig, which had come to a stop about ten feet or so from its rear end. The second vehicle’s flatbed was empty, but when Emily climbed up onto the cab’s footplate and wiped away the snow from the passenger window, she could see the cabin was not.
“Jesus!” Emily exclaimed.
Where she had expected to find the frozen body of the rig’s driver, she instead found an alien pupa. It was stretched across both the driver’s and passenger’s seats, and a light sheen of frost covered the outside of the dark-red shell. It was at least twice as big as the pupae she had seen in her newspaper’s offices back in Manhattan, and Emily wondered just how many people had been crammed into this cabin when the red rain had claimed them.
She dropped to the snow and moved to the next truck. There were two more pupae inside. Each resting on the seat where the human host had died.
It was the same for the next ten vehicles she checked. Every seat filled. Everyone inside dead.
But some of the convoy’s refugees, either trying to escape or maybe stepping outside to see why the convoy had stopped, had not been changed. They lay frozen on the ground, their still-human outlines barely visible beneath the layer of snow that had settled over them, a shroud of pure white. Some had not managed to make it any farther than their open doors and now lay face-down in the snow, their torsos covered by a white veil while their bottom halves remained inside their vehicles.