Lincoln Child: Terminal Freeze

“Twenty miles,” the trucker muttered. “If we make it.”

“Twenty miles,” she said, then replaced the handset onto the CB unit. “We have to make it. How’s the petrol?”

“Left tank drained awful fast.” Carradine tapped the instrument panel. “Says we’ve got enough for another ten.”

“Even if it runs out, we can walk the other ten miles.”

“In that?” He pointed out over the steering wheel into the wasteland of the Zone. “Beg pardon, ma’am, but cold as they are already, those in the back wouldn’t last two hundred yards.”

Barbour glanced out through the windshield. A red smudge of dawn smeared the horizon line. The storm was quickly abating: the wind had died to almost nothing, and the surrounding landscape was now coated in a fresh mantle of powdery snow. But as the storm receded, the temperature had plummeted. The instrument panel read minus twenty-two degrees.

The truck shook roughly and she grabbed the stabilizer bar. Twenty miles. At current speed, that meant over half an hour.

She glanced at the GPS device mounted on the dashboard. She was used to seeing the unit in her own car, always bristling with streets, highways, and landmarks as she drove around Lexington, Woburn, and the greater Boston area. But the GPS in Carradine’s truck was utterly blank: a screen as white and featureless as the snow outside, with only a compass heading and latitude-longitude reading to indicate they were moving at all.

“You look tired,” Carradine said. “Why don’t you rest?”

“You must be joking,” she replied. And yet this tense and seemingly endless vigil-on the heels of so many sleepless hours at Fear Base-had exhausted her. She closed her eyes to rest them, just for a moment. And when she opened them again, everything was different. The sky was a little brighter, the snow around them sparkling with sunlight. The sound of the truck had changed, too: the RPMs were lower, the speed dropping noticeably.

“How long was I asleep?” she asked.

“Fifteen minutes.”

“How’s the fuel?”

Carradine glanced at the instrumentation. “We’re on fumes.”

The truck was still slowing. And now, glancing again at the GPS, Barbour noticed it was, in fact, displaying something: a band of unrelieved blue, filling the top half of the screen.

“That’s not another-” she began, then stopped.

“Yup. Gunner Lake.”

Fear-which had ebbed to a dull sense of anxiety-surged afresh. “I thought you said we were only going to cross one lake!”

“I did. But we don’t have the gas to detour around this one anymore.”

Barbour didn’t reply. She swallowed, licked her lips. Her mouth felt very dry.

“Don’t worry. Gunner Lake is broad, but it ain’t wide.”

She looked at him. “Why had you planned to go around it, then?”

Carradine hesitated briefly. “The lake’s only about forty feet deep. It’s littered with big rocks, glacial erratics, and the like. In these conditions, with the snow cover, sometimes they can be hard to see. If we hit one by mistake…”

He didn’t finish. He didn’t need to.

She glanced out through the windshield. The lake was clearly visible just ahead. Carradine worked his way down the gears as they approached the shore.

“Aren’t you going to stop?” she said. “Test the ice depth with your power auger?”

“No time,” the trucker replied. “No gas.”

They crept out onto the ice. Once again, Barbour squeezed the stabilizer bar with all her might at the sensation of ice flexing under their weight; again, she felt the tension rise as the dreadful crackling began once more, spreading out from beneath the wheels in all directions. A few rocks were clearly visible, poking above the snow cover like fangs, their black tops shining in the morning sun. Others were hidden beneath drifts. The retreating wind had tucked and piled the snow into fantastic shapes: ridges and peaks and miniature buttes. Carradine made his way across the surface, threading the truck carefully between the rocks and snow formations. Barbour kept glancing from the GPS to the frozen lake and back again, willing the display to update, to show white once again.

Three minutes passed, then five. The crackling grew louder, fractures forking away before them in spastic lines. The engine hic-cupped; Carradine feathered it and the RPMs returned to normal. Barbour could guess what would happen if they ran out of gas while on the ice.

“Nearly there,” the trucker said, as if reading her thoughts.

A low ridge of snow appeared directly ahead, perhaps forty yards wide, scooped and scalloped by the wind until it resembled a cresting wave. “That’s got to be pure snow,” Carradine said. “Can’t risk veering around it, might spin out again. We’ll plow straight through, clear the path for the trailer. Hang on.”

Barbour was already hanging on with a grip that could not possibly be tightened. She held her breath as Carradine aimed the truck directly at the snow ridge. As it shuddered under the impact, Carradine goosed the throttle, maintaining speed.

Suddenly, the front of the truck kicked violently into the air. Barbour was thrown forward, her head almost impacting the dashboard despite the seat belt. “Christ!” Carradine said, turning the wheel to the left. “Must have been a boulder hidden under that ridge!”

There was a second impact as the rear right wheels of the cab went over the boulder. The truck rose, then fell heavily onto the ice. There was a sound like the retort of a cannon and the big vehicle suddenly slowed. Barbour felt herself pressed back against the seat.

“We’re going down in the rear!” the trucker yelled. “Get on the horn-tell everyone in the trailer to move forward, now!”

Barbour fumbled for the CB handset, dropped it, picked it up again. “Fortnum, we’ve broken through the ice. Get everybody to the front of the trailer. Hurry.”

She replaced the handset as Carradine frantically gunned the diesel. The truck strained forward, listing to the rear, splitting the frozen surface, the back end of the trailer literally forcing its way through the spreading ice. Barbour felt them tilt back still farther, the angle increasing. “No!” she heard herself crying out. “God, no!”

Carradine shifted gears and jammed the accelerator to the floor. There was another crack, almost as loud as the first, and with a shriek of effort the truck shook itself free of the hole in the ice and shot forward. Quickly, Carradine throttled back, careful not to lose control on the slick surface. Barbour slumped in her seat, almost overcome by relief.

“They don’t get any closer than that,” Carradine said. He glanced at the gasoline indicator. “Tank’s bone dry now. I can’t imagine what we’re running on.”

Barbour looked at the GPS indicator. And now at last she saw a white line of dry land a quarter mile directly ahead.

Clearing the last set of rocks, the truck roared up onto the shore and accelerated. Carradine fetched a huge, shuddering breath, plucking his floral shirt away from his skinny frame and fanning himself with it. Then he sat up, pointed ahead. “Look!”

Barbour peered through the windshield. In the distance, where the sky met the horizon, she made out a low cluster of black shapes, a blinking red light.

“Is that-” she began.

The trucker nodded, grinning hugely. “ Arctic Village.”

Quickly, she picked up the CB handset. “Barbour to Fortnum. We made it. Arctic Village is just ahead.”

And as she replaced the handset she thought she could hear-floating forward, over the grinding of the diesel-the sound of cheers.

The day was as clear and bright as crystal, as if the elements-ashamed of their ferocity-were eager to atone for the storm. The air was absolutely still, without a breath of wind, and if Marshall looked away from the base-toward the broad icepack and the perfect dome of sky above it-he could almost imagine that, in this remote and wild place, nature had a palette of only two colors: white and blue.