Extinction Point - Exodus Part 15

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 sa.s.sy 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 makes.h.i.+ft 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 slipped 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 embarra.s.sment 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 a.s.sembled 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 b.u.t.ton. She waited for it to wake, then hit Redial and the Speakerphone b.u.t.tons 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 pa.s.sed 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 h.e.l.l 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 winds.h.i.+eld 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.

"s.h.i.+t," 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 gla.s.s of the winds.h.i.+eld. 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 s.p.a.ces 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 s.h.i.+fting, like they were in the middle of an earthquake.

Before the world had disappeared, she had pa.s.sed 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 ill.u.s.trate the hopelessness of their predicament, an extra strong flurry of snow splattered against the winds.h.i.+eld. Momentarily overwhelmed, the winds.h.i.+eld 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 pa.s.sed, and still there was no sign of the building she had seen. Emily was convinced she had pa.s.sed it. She was going to have to turn around.

"There it is." Rhiannon's excited cry was accompanied by the sound of her knuckles. .h.i.tting the gla.s.s 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 pa.s.s, 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 s.h.i.+ver as the wind cut through the group huddling against the side of the big machine.

"Let's go," Emily yelled, her voice m.u.f.fled 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.

"s.h.i.+t. Stay here. I have to head back to the Cat," she told Rhiannon.

Back at the vehicle, Emily opened the rear pa.s.senger 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, bas.h.i.+ng and pus.h.i.+ng 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 G.o.d, 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 moonshaped 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 s.h.i.+t fell to earth. Little Rhiannon would adapt, overcome, and move on. a.s.suming, of course, that she lived through whatever hards.h.i.+ps and challenges were still headed their way. I, on the other hand, Emily mused, am too G.o.dd.a.m.n 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 pa.s.sing, pus.h.i.+ng 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 pa.s.sed? 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 b.u.mped 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 someone could burst in and try to kill them, or worse. And what if there was more than one a.s.sailant? 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 d.a.m.n 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 compa.s.s display on the Cat's computer screen to guide them in the right direction.