Extinct (24 page)

“Yeah, it does appear different forces are at play here. At home we got lots of snow and people disappearing into the air. South of Portland, I found lots of bodies and less snow. In New Hampshire, no snow at all and a carrion tide dissolving all the people it could find.”

Halfway through explaining to himself, Robby stopped speaking out loud and just thought the ideas in his head.

“That stuff was like a liquid cleanup crew. Like a wet cleaners instead of a dry cleaners. It also seemed to be a trap to catch any stragglers. I wonder if it eventually formed a grid to catch all the leftover people like me who didn’t have their eyes blasted out,” he thought.

Robby drifted off to sleep with one hand on the steering wheel and the other on the gear shift. A potato chip sat on his chest.

Chapter 10: Brad Traveling

T
HE
SNOWMOBILE
MOVED
EASILY
over the ice as long as he kept it pointing directly up or down a slope. He ran into trouble when he tried to ride along the side of a snow dune. Then, the back end of the sled wanted to slip down the hill faster than the front. Brad checked his compass and map often, but he had trouble finding enough landmarks in the deep snow to keep him on course.
 

He intended to find the highway and follow it south. After half-an-hour of following what he thought was his road, Brad conceded he had no idea where the highway might be. He should have crossed it, if he’d stayed on course. Near his house, the highway ran almost east and west. So, if he traveled roughly south, south-east, as he intended, he should find it or even cross it.

He thought perhaps he did cross it and just didn’t know. In his mind, it would be easy to spot—a big swath of smooth snow, dotted with overpasses and marked down the center with a hump. But, with the random drifts and rolling dunes, perhaps it wouldn’t be so obvious.
 

Brad let the engine of the snowmobile idle as he consulted his map.

Instead of looking at the roads, Brad paid more attention to the contour lines and shading of the map. Those he tried to align with the hills in the distance. He smiled as he squinted at the distant hills—he felt more relaxed being able to see the horizon.

The real key to his navigation turned out to be the waterways. They cut through the landscape, leaving big ribbons of troughs. The river was frozen over and snow accumulated on top, but far less snow than on the banks. As a result, when Brad finally came upon the river he figured out exactly where he was. The curve of the river, the way it narrowed before the dam, and the hump of the bridge let him triangulate a specific spot on the map. Once he figured it out, Brad was able to make sense of some of the other bumps and curves of the snow dunes.
 

On the far side of the river, Brad saw a thin black line in a wall of snow. He identified the line as the top windows of the old mill. The snow drifted dozens of feet deeper than he believed earlier.
 

Brad angled his snowmobile towards the hump of snow covering the old bridge so he could get a closer look.

He made his way carefully down the slope to where he thought the bridge started. Somewhere under snow was a green bridge consisting of overhead steel trusses, holding up the road surface over the falls. The snow mound looked solid from a distance, but up close he saw bumps and holes aligned with the steel trusses beneath. It didn’t look at all safe enough for his snowmobile, even with the icy shell on top of the snow. On either side of the bridge, the snow sloped down way too steeply. Brad imagined getting safely down to the frozen river—assuming the ice there was thick enough to support the loaded snowmobile—but he didn’t know how he could get back up the other side.
 

Brad looked up and down the river.

The next closest bridge was east and a little north, but it was a local road. He could get across the river, but then he wouldn’t have any good landmarks to follow on his trip south. To the west, the next bridge was where the highway crossed the river. He’d have to track a ways back north to get there, but then he might be able to recognize and stay with the highway as it turned south.
 

Brad turned the snowmobile around in a wide arc and headed north and west, keeping the dip of the river valley on his left shoulder, always within sight.

As he made his way through neighborhoods and across town, Brad didn’t see many landmarks punching up through the snowpack. He saw treetops here and there, and the occasional peak of a roof, but most of civilization was buried under a thick white blanket.

The bridge where the highway crossed the river was easy to spot. The black hole beneath it drew Brad’s eye. As he traveled up the shore of the river, keeping the sharp drop-off on his left, he saw a black dot approaching. Above it, the big mound of snow blended in with the gray horizon, but the black was unique in this landscape. Around the edges, as he got closer, Brad saw the hazy blue of translucent snow.
 

To Brad, It looked like a portion of clear night sky existed just in one spot, and it entranced him. As he drew even closer, he discerned two distinct black spots, separated by a thin line of white.
 

He let the snowmobile slow to a halt as he considered the scene. The river headed about northwest here, and from his map he saw the train tracks veered away from the river’s edge to head almost north.

Looking northwest, the river valley stopped suddenly where the highway bridge crossed. Beneath this bridge the snow left deep caves—Brad’s black patches of night sky.

“They’re just snow caves, under the bridge,” he told the idling snowmobile. “There’s nothing under there, I’m sure.” After all, he didn’t see any tracks away from the black holes, or any disturbance in the snow at all. But he couldn’t take his eyes off those black spots, and couldn’t convince himself there wasn’t something living down there where the light didn’t seem to penetrate.
 

Brad started the snowmobile moving again, but wished the whining engine didn’t make so much noise as he followed the river up to the bridge.

The bridge made a big double hump across the river. Brad felt better once he was aligned with the highway and couldn’t see the black caves under the bridge anymore. His instinct told him to line up with the center of the double hump and go right down the middle of the bridge, but his memory rejected that idea. If he remembered correctly, each direction of the highway had its own separate bridge. That little dip of the double hump might just be a suspension of ice and snow, supported by nothing. Brad needed to aim for the rounded top of one of the humps to make sure he would stay over pavement. On either side, the snow dropped off a good fifty feet to the bottom of the river valley. The last thing he wanted to do was plunge fifty feet into whatever was at the back of the black cave.

Brad chose the hump on the right and steered for the center. The highway beneath was two lanes with generous shoulders on both sides, but the top of the hump looked dangerously small to keep his snowmobile centered on. Brad thought about how easily the back end would slide if he missed his mark and aligned with either edge of the hump. He started slow, but as the banks fell away on either side he found himself speeding up, trying to get across faster. The bridge straddled the five hundred feet of the river, plus a bit extra on the sides where the banks swept down to the edge.
 

Through his weeks of battling the snow, Brad learned how to stay warm. He left no skin exposed. His flannel-lined pants were tucked into his waterproof boots, which kept the snow from reaching his wool socks. Over the pants and over the boots he wore snow pants bought years earlier for snowboarding. On his torso, Brad wore layers. The top jacket snapped into his snow pants. A special, breathable scarf wrapped his lower face and tucked under his hood. Goggles covered his eyes. The yellow lenses gave definition to the snow shadows and the tight band around the hood made it move with his head as he turned. Two-part gloves covered his hands—the inner for warmth, and the outer for the waterproof layer extending with cuffs over his forearms.

Because of all this protection, Brad didn’t notice the strength of the wind until about a third of the way across the bridge. A gust rocked his snowmobile and caused the back end to slip left, towards the cleft between the lanes of the highway.
 

Brad slowed, trying to get the snowmobile under control. He immediately recognized the mistake. With no power driving the snowmobile from the back, the skid intensified. Brad stood and shifted his weight to the right—that kicked the rear end even farther to the left. Brad goosed the throttle, but with his weight shifted to the right, he couldn’t steer into the skid. When he pushed the right handlebar away, he moved his weight to the left. He had a high center of gravity because of the backpack full of food. The snowmobile rolled up onto the left ski and threatened to tip over.

Brad didn’t have any choice. He lowered his weight down to the seat and steered to the left to regain control and keep the snowmobile from rolling. The sled straightened out and shot down into the cleft. Brad felt like his heart would beat right out of his chest. He pictured the bridge in cross-section. As he remembered it, the northbound and southbound lanes of the highway shared nothing in common except perhaps foundations at the river’s surface. Between the two humps of snow covering the traffic lanes, the snow and ice must be suspended above nothing. Perhaps the wind created a drift held up by nothing more than melting and refreezing ice until after weeks the drift spanned the gap. Then, maybe ice capped the whole delicate structure, giving it the illusion of a solid surface.

Before Brad reached the lowest part of the cleft, he heard the first crack. It sounded like a rifle shot echoing in a canyon. Worse than the sound, he
felt
the crack send a shockwave up through his snowmobile. Brad hunched lower behind the windscreen and opened the throttle all the way. The back end of the snowmobile danced as the tracks tried to drive the skis faster over the ice. Brad didn’t try to steer—the machine headed for the upslope to the northbound lane and he let it go. He figured he would try to regain control just as soon as he wasn’t hovering on thin ice over a chasm of death.

The slope up to the northbound bridge broke under the pressure of his skis. They dug into the ice and turned the front of the sled away. Brad reengaged his arms and tried to steer against the rebuff, but the skis wouldn’t bite. Behind him, another rifle shot crack cut through the noise of the engine and made the hair on the back of Brad’s neck stand up.
 

Brad steered back to the right, to try to climb back to the southbound lane. He was about two-thirds of the way across the river at this point, but had no thoughts about reaching the other side. He just wanted to reach the safety of pavement somewhere beneath his snowmobile.

With the third echoing crack, Brad saw evidence of the damage to the ice. A jagged white line shot out like lightning from beneath his snowmobile and ran down the length of the cleft. He felt the ice sag as he tried to climb the slope back up to the southbound hump.

The rear end of the snowmobile jumped to the left when a chunk of ice gave way. Brad looked back over his shoulder to see the snow and ice falling away, revealing a white hole which disappeared into blue depths. Somewhere down there he knew he’d find the black if he fell. He would find the night-sky black in that cave, and he would find out if something lived down there.

Brad leaned to the right to balance out his sled as he tried to climb the side of the hill while still moving forward. His right hip floated just inches over the ice, but he kept the snowmobile from rolling.
 

He never made it back to the top of the southbound bridge’s hump.

The hump had a slight lip on it, and every time Brad tried to angle the snowmobile to crest it, the back end of the sled would skid.
 

Brad panted and sweat soaked through his shirt as he fought the machine, but before he could summit the hump, it disappeared. The ridge line marking the lip simply faded into the snow, and instead of climbing back up on the hump of the southbound bridge, Brad found himself on a flat stretch of ice with no hump to fight. Brad looked back and saw the bridge behind him.

He let the snowmobile slow to a stop. In between the lanes, giant holes opened up in the ice leaving snowmobile-eating chasms. Brad took a deep breath and it shuddered out of his chest. His breath felt thick. He clawed the goggles from his face and wiped the corners of his eyes with his glove.
 

“That
sucked
,” he said. He giggled into the back of his glove while looking at the holes through the ice. The edges of each hole looked blue, but even at this distance he thought he could see the black down there somewhere.
 

“Guess I’ll come back over the bay,” he said.