Extinction Point - Exodus Part 16

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, las.h.i.+ng great sheets of snow across the vehicle, but then it would pa.s.s 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 pa.s.sed, 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 sh.o.r.eline, the only movement on an otherwise gla.s.slike 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 sh.o.r.eline. 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 s.p.a.ce 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 a.s.sumed that was to allow boats to pull into the building and discharge their cargo and any pa.s.sengers 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 fis.h.i.+ng 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 h.e.l.l 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 fis.h.i.+ng 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.

"You 'pilot' a boat," Emily corrected her. "And I have absolutely no clue."

Rhiannon handed Emily the last of the supplies from the pile they had made on the dockside. Emily stowed them in a back corner of the wheelhouse and on one of the six seats the boat sported.

The controls of the boat were similar to the Dodge Durango and the Sno-Cat only in that they all had a steering wheel. That was about where the similarity ended. There were several gauges and indicators on the control console that Emily figured had something to do with the speed, oil pressure, and wind direction. A black box with a dull LCD screen was perched just behind the steering wheel, and Emily again a.s.sumed that this was some kind of navigation instrument similar to a GPS, or maybe it was a sonar. She had no idea. There were no brake or accelerator pedals, just a handle to the right of the captain's chair that she thought was probably the throttle for the two big engines at the back of the boat. Next to that was the slot for the ignition; the key had been helpfully sitting on the captain's seat when they'd arrived. To the right of the ignition a large red b.u.t.ton read: ENGINE START.

She had no idea what any of the gizmos or other dials actually did, nor did she think that she needed to. "You just need to start the engine and point it north along the coast," Jacob had explained to her. "It's a double hull, so it's really stable. Just don't hit anything, and you'll be fine." She hoped he was right, because she was sure that if she capsized them, they wouldn't last more than two minutes in these frigid ice-strewn waters.

"Is that the last of it?" she asked.

Rhiannon nodded enthusiastically. "That's it, Cap'n," she said, in a pretty good impression of Johnny Depp's character from the Pirates of the Caribbean movies. She had been using the same accent and addressing Emily as Cap'n ever since they had started switching the supplies from the Cat to the boat. Rhia was dreadfully impressed with her own mimicry, apparently, because a fit of giggles always followed the sentence.

Emily didn't mind; given the circ.u.mstances, it was good to hear the kid laughing. And it helped relieve the tension she felt about taking the boat out.

The SUV and Cat had been one thing: she knew where the brakes were and could always stop and just get out if the need arose. But this was something totally different. The closest she had ever come to a boat was watching a rerun of t.i.tanic on TV. If something went wrong out there, she could end up drowning the both of them.

Just stick close to the coastline, and you'll be fine, Jacob's memory reminded her again.

"Okay, you landlubber," Emily said, playing along with her own best pirate voice. "Let's untie that knotty rope thing over there and see what we can do, shall we?"

Rhiannon pulled at the knot of the rope tied to the mooring bollard, tossing it onto the deck of the boat, narrowly missing Thor, who had already made himself comfortable next to the supplies. Emily took Rhiannon's hand and helped her leap into the boat, which was already beginning to bob away from the concrete dock.

She made her way back into the wheelhouse and sat in the captain's chair. "Best sit down," she said to Rhiannon. She turned the key to the "on" position and pressed the big red b.u.t.ton next to it.

There was a sound like metal rubbed against metal, then each of the two engines coughed once, billowed a gray puff of smoke, and sparked into life, kicking a fountain of water into the air. The boat immediately began to move forward, heading straight for the tugboat on the opposite side of the dock.

"Oh, s.h.i.+t," said Rhiannon, instantly throwing her hand over her mouth, her eyes betraying her surprise at letting slip a cussword in front of Emily. If Emily had noticed, she didn't let on; she was too busy turning the wheel frantically to the right, trying to avoid the slowly but inexorably approaching bigger vessel.

The boat began to turn...sharply. It missed the other boat, but now it was heading toward the metal wall of the shed separating the sea from the inside of the dock. She spun the wheel in the opposite direction, this time not so hard. The pointy end of the boat began to gradually drift away from the wall as it leveled out. When the sides of the boat were parallel with the dock and the opposite wall, Emily moved the wheel back to the center position and, after a couple more minor corrections, managed to get the boat moving in a straight line.

She aimed the front of the boat for the gap that led out to the ocean beyond, her hand hovering over the throttle lever but still too unsure to touch it.

They coasted through the opening and into the open water, bouncing on the rougher waves beyond the dock building. The front of the boat dipped suddenly and rose dramatically before dropping down onto the surface with a splash that rocked the inside of the vessel. Emily dropped her hand to the throttle and pushed slowly, listening to the throb of the engines increase as the boat began to pick up speed. The pointy bit-wasn't it called the prow?-began to cut through the waves, which, contrary to her beachside observation, were a h.e.l.l of a lot bigger than they had looked from the safety of the Sno-Cat's cabin.

The incoming tide pushed back against the engines, and Emily had the distinct impression that they weren't actually moving. Although how she was supposed to judge whether she was making any kind of headway was kind of beyond her. Everything out there seemed to be moving, and any object that she could use to judge her speed by was either too far away or shrouded by the clouds and falling snow.

"Screw it," she said and pushed the throttle lever forward. This time the engines roared, and there was no doubt that they were moving as the prow lifted slightly off the ocean's surface and pushed Emily and Rhiannon back into their seats.

"Wow!" said Rhiannon as the boat bounced and tilted over the waves, the coast a couple of hundred feet off the right of the boat now as Emily swung parallel to it and followed Jacob's instructions, heading north along its rocky edge.

They were moving fast, water spraying across the gla.s.s of the wheelhouse. Emily almost pulled back on the throttle; her hand hovered over it as she considered what she should do next. It would be the safest thing to do, but she was so tired of all this. Tired of the constant stress and worry and driving and eating s.h.i.+tty meals and more driving. Tired of always being afraid and, dear G.o.d almighty, she was so very, very tired of traveling. She just wanted to lie in a bed and know that she was going to be sleeping in it the next night and the night after that. To eat a hot meal and have someone who wasn't a teenager to talk to.

She wanted for all of this to finally be over.

That reality was now just forty miles or so away. They were almost there.

Her hand dropped to her side as she let the boat speed on.

Emily was convinced the temperature had dropped at least ten degrees since they'd left the harbor. There was a heater in the cabin, but it was struggling, working overtime just to keep the temperature above freezing. Rhiannon had situated herself next to it, blocking the flow of warm air into the cabin, which didn't really help.

They had left the confines of Prudhoe Bay and entered the open sea beyond. As Emily had banked the boat around the outcrop that marked the entrance to the bay, a stronger crosscurrent caught the boat and slammed them sideways, pus.h.i.+ng them rapidly toward the coast. The boat pitched and tossed like a roller coaster as Emily fought the wheel to keep from beaching.

"Oh my G.o.d. I'm going to throw up," burped Rhiannon, her face turning green.

Emily ignored her and kept turning the wheel until the boat was facing out to sea again, then she powered up the engines and fought back against the waves that grabbed at the keel of the craft.

She pushed the throttle all the way to 75 percent and felt the propellers push the boat forward, cutting through the waves as they sped back out to sea. Judging they were far enough from the sh.o.r.e to not risk becoming grounded, Emily turned the boat back onto its new eastern heading and looked over at Rhiannon, who was still looking a little green but had managed to keep her food down. Thor was curled up in the corner, fast asleep and apparently oblivious to how close they had come to becoming a s.h.i.+pwreck.

They saw the first iceberg fifteen minutes later; it wasn't very big, not much more than a ten-foot-by-fifteen-foot sheet of ice floating on the surface of the sea. But Emily gave it a wide birth, memories of the movie t.i.tanic rising once again to the surface.

An iceberg! It was all a little too surreal.

An hour later they spotted the family of polar bears. There were three of them-a mother and two cubs-sauntering along the sh.o.r.eline, their white coats stained brown with mud as they dipped their heads to examine rock-pools or lifted their noses to the wind, sniffing inquisitively.

Emily slowed the boat and joined Rhiannon in gawking at the sight. Even Thor seemed excited, watching from the back of the boat, his paws resting on a shelf so he could get a better look. It would have been a beautiful sight even before the devastation of the red rain. Seeing this first hint that there was still hope that some life had escaped the rain's effects, well, it was just magical.

"Look how big they are," said Rhiannon. "I never thought they would be so big." The kid was right; the adult had to weigh at least four hundred pounds.

When momma bear stopped and turned to face the boat, taking a couple of tentative steps out into the ocean toward them, Emily decided they might be hungrier than they looked and eased the throttle forward, quickly putting some distance between the bears and the boat as she accelerated east.

Jacob had told them to look for maps when they were on board the boat, and they had found a bunch of them stowed in a drawer. Emily had rea.s.signed Rhiannon her old job as navigator and set her to work finding a map that showed their destination. Rhiannon had quickly found one labeled "McClure and Stockton Islands and Vicinity" and laid it out on the floor where she could get a good look at it.

Glancing down at the map from behind the wheel, Emily thought it didn't look like any kind of map she had ever seen. It gave a detailed outline of the coastline, but the sea was filled with squiggly lines and numbers that she thought probably represented the depth of the sea in those locations.

Emily couldn't afford to take her attention off piloting the boat, so she was relying on Rhiannon to accurately predict their position, which she seemed to be very good at. She had quickly ascertained their position after leaving Prudhoe Bay and was calling out landmarks before they even appeared.

"This is Foggy Island Bay," she had announced at one point. "There's going to be something called a shoal coming up." A few minutes later they had pa.s.sed the shoal, a collection of elongated sandbars that formed a natural harbor. "Now we need to keep heading east, toward..." She paused as she tried to p.r.o.nounce the name of the upcoming landmark. "Tig...Tig...Var...Iak. Tigvariak Island!" Rhiannon picked up the map and folded it so it was small enough to carry, staggering over to Emily as the boat bucked and rolled.

"Here's where we are." She tapped a finger against the coastline. "And here's Tigvariak Island." Her finger traced an imaginary line to a largish island just off the coast of the mainland. "And then," she continued, "we just have to head this way to get to Jacob's island." She unfolded the top of the map to reveal the group of islands collectively known as the Stocktons, sitting about six miles farther out to sea and northeast of the farthest tip of Tigvariak Island.

Jacob was on the largest of the islands: Pole Island, a scythe-shaped ma.s.s of land approximately four miles in length and a quarter-mile wide.

It took the little boat another two hours to reach Tigvariak Island, a desolate-looking lump of rock that looked to be nothing more than rolling tundra. As Emily steered the boat along the craggy west coast of the island, she felt her nerves begin to get the better of her. They were about to head out into open ocean, and soon after they would be miles from land, with no navigational equipment other than the large compa.s.s on the boat's control panel. As long as she kept the boat heading in a northeast direction, there was little chance that they would miss the little cl.u.s.ter of islands, but the idea of being so far from land made her very uneasy.

She had come this far using Jacob's advice to guide her, and he had not been wrong so far, she reminded herself. If he said she could do it, then she had better believe she could.

There were only a few miles of their journey left. And she'd be d.a.m.ned if she was going to turn back now.

The coast of Alaska was a distant shadow on the horizon behind them as the little boat continued to bounce and cleave its way northeast through the swell of the Arctic Ocean. The farther away from land they moved, the more icebergs they saw in the water. While most of them were small clumps of floating white that bobbed harmlessly by, occasionally they would spot a larger sheet of ice that could easily put a hole in the hull of the boat. Emily had stationed Rhiannon up front with her; her younger eyes were better equipped to spot the dangerous bergs well before they got too close. Emily steered around them, hoping that these minor adjustments to their voyage would not throw them too far off from their original course.

The sea had become rougher, too. Huge swells lifted the boat, then dropped them down again, sending waves of water onto the deck outside their enclosed cabin. To the west Emily could see a bank of black clouds that descended from the sky down to sea level. It looked to be heading their way, and Emily hoped to G.o.d that they made it to sh.o.r.e before the storm caught up with them.

Rhiannon had spotted the storm, too, and she was in the process of explaining that she thought they were only a few miles offsh.o.r.e of Pole Island when a huge wave struck the boat, sending the prow almost vertical before dropping it again, slamming the hull into the ocean's surface.

Emily screamed and clung on to the wheel as it suddenly seemed to gain a life all its own. Rhiannon and Thor both squealed in unison and slipped across the floor toward the back of the cabin. Rhiannon managed to grab the back of a chair and steady herself, but Thor collided with the rear wall and yelped in pain and fright.

"Hold on," yelled Emily as another wave lifted them sideways, then deposited them unceremoniously down again with a thunderous splash. Thor skidded back toward the front of the cabin, his paws scrambling for grip but finding no purchase on the plastic floor. He collided squarely with the back of Emily's calves, buckling her knees and sending her toppling astern, her hands slipping off the metal of the boat's wheel. She slid backward and collided with the bottom edge of a seat, yelling in pain as, even through the layers of cold-weather gear, the plastic cut painfully across her shoulders.

Rhiannon looked mortified. She clung to her chair like a life preserver as the boat bucked and thrashed, hitting wave after wave, the wheel spinning wildly back and forth.

"Tie yourself down," Emily yelled to Rhiannon, pointing to the black safety belt that hung limply from the seat as she crawled her way back toward the captain's chair. Rhiannon dragged herself into the seat and grabbed the safety belt, clicking it into place as she gripped the base of the chair with both hands as tightly as she could.

Emily reached out for the support that fixed the captain's chair to the deck and grabbed it. She looked back toward the back of the cabin for Thor; he was scrambling toward her. She grabbed the big dog's collar and heaved him toward her, sliding the terrified dog over the floor. When she was sure she had a firm grip, she pulled Thor up to her and then pushed him into the s.p.a.ce between the seat support and the flat of the boat's control console, jamming him in as best she could. When he was safe, she pulled herself to her feet and flung herself into the captain's seat. She jammed her feet under Thor's belly so he couldn't move and quickly fastened her own seat belt into place. Then she grabbed the wheel and glanced at the compa.s.s; the boat was now heading west.

"s.h.i.+t!" Emily turned the wheel, fighting the rogue waves as they tried to force the boat in the direction they wanted to take it. She thrust the throttle forward until it would go no farther. The boat instantly swung around, the engines thrusting them up the front of another wave and through it this time, rather than over. She couldn't see anything through the haze of water kicked up by the speeding boat as it sliced the ocean apart.

Emily glanced down at the control panel, located the switch she was looking for, and pushed it. The two large wipers began throwing the water off the gla.s.s winds.h.i.+eld, and within seconds she could see clearly again.

Ahead of them, not more than a quarter mile away, appearing out of the spray like Avalon from the mist, was the shadowy outline of land.

Emily could see a fragile-looking wooden dock sticking out from a shale beach that sloped down to meet the cras.h.i.+ng waves.

She fought the wheel and used what little strength she still had left to turn it until the prow of the boat was heading toward it. The waves were still roaring in fast and hard, smas.h.i.+ng against the side of the boat, and she could feel the current trying to drag them away from the rapidly approaching beach. She was half-tempted to reduce the boat's speed to the minimum needed to make headway and plant the boat, pointy end first, into the shale of the beach. It looked deep enough to slow them.

But Jacob had warned her that this boat was their only way to escape off the island when the time came. If she damaged it, there was no guarantee they had the tools or expertise to fix it. Or worse still, she might plant the boat in the shale and sink the d.a.m.n thing, or it could even be swept out to sea, and them along with it, with no way to beach it.

No, she was going to have to try to bring it in alongside the jetty and secure it.

Here we go again, she thought as she eased the throttle down and tried to judge the best angle to reach the dock safely.

The boat pitched hard to the left, sc.r.a.ping the front side along the wooden dock, cracking a plank and sending the pieces flying through the air. Emily resisted the urge to turn the wheel all the way to the right, which would just send the back end cras.h.i.+ng into the dock, too; this needed finesse.

The swell was not as strong this close to the sh.o.r.e, but the waves were hitting more frequently, so she needed to constantly adjust the boat's att.i.tude. She eased the throttle to just above the "stop" marker and angled the front of the boat slightly away from the side of the dock as the beach drew rapidly closer.

"Slow down, d.a.m.n you," she hissed through clenched teeth. "Slow. The. f.u.c.k. Down."

Now she was just a pa.s.senger.

The boat gave a final lurch forward, then stopped, bobbing like a fis.h.i.+ng float on the ocean's surface, a few feet from the edge of the dock.

Close enough, she judged.

Emily unfastened her seat belt and ran to the back of the cabin. Flinging open the door, she grabbed the mooring rope from the deck and launched herself over the side of the boat before it could drift any farther away. She landed on the jetty and ran to the nearby mooring bollard, unreeling the rope behind her.

How the h.e.l.l was she supposed to tie this thing off so it wouldn't float away?

The cold wind beat against her and spray from the sea soaked her unprotected head with freezing water, sending stinging droplets of salt water into her eyes. If she stood there much longer she was going to either freeze or get blown into the water and drown. Emily strained against the rope, pulling as hard as she could to get the boat closer to the sh.o.r.e. She looped the end of the rope around the metal bollard and then tied it off the only way she knew how, with a bow. It might look weird, but at least she knew it was a secure knot...and it added a little panache, too. A win-win situation if you asked her.

She leaped carefully back onto the deck of the boat, slipping on the wet surface, before opening the door to the cabin. She could hear the engines still idling, barely audible against the cras.h.i.+ng of the waves against the sh.o.r.e and the wind that whipped past the cabin.

Inside she pressed the same red b.u.t.ton she had to start the engines and felt rather than heard the purr of the engines slowly die away.

Emily turned to Rhiannon and just looked at her. It was as if the whole world had suddenly stopped rotating. Here she was, how many days and how many thousands of miles later?

She was finally here.

It felt as though she had been holding her breath from the moment she had first seen the red rain fall that fateful day.

A sense of peace, almost serenity, washed over her.

"Grab your stuff," Emily said finally. "We're almost home."

"Just your backpack for now," Emily told Rhiannon. "We'll come back for the rest of the supplies tomorrow, when we have some extra pairs of hands."