Emily glanced at the digital clock on the dashboard; it read 3:18. Still a couple of hours of light left but with the snow reducing visibility, it was probably better if they tried to find the university as quickly as possible.
Jacob had told Emily that it would be a mistake to try to make the final leg of the trip in the Durango. “It just won’t be capable of making it,” he had explained. “The engine isn’t designed to take the kind of gasoline you’ll need, and if it gets cold enough, it’ll freeze in the lines and you along with it.”
He had told her she needed to find his department at the university. “Look for the Geophysical Institute building. We have a couple of Sno-Cats that will be better suited to the terrain.”
When she had expressed her concern about how she was supposed to drive this new vehicle, Jacob had told her not to worry. “If you figured out how to drive the Durango, you shouldn’t have a problem.”
Emily wasn’t sure she agreed with him, but he had been right about most things so far.
“Okay, young lady, buckle up,” she said and carefully edged the SUV out onto the snow-covered road.
They spent the night on the second floor of the Geophysical Institute building, serenaded by a storm that, come morning, had added a fresh layer of snow several inches deep, completely covering the SUV they had left parked on the narrow road outside the building.
Jacob had told Emily that she would find the Sno-Cat in a storage facility on the north side of the Geo-Phys building, so, after breakfast—soup they found in the second-floor lounge—they threw on their cold-weather gear and headed out, descending down to ground level. Rhiannon found a fire escape that led them out to the rear of the building, but when Emily pushed down on the bar to open it, the door would not budge. She tried again, this time leaning her shoulder into it, and she felt the door give a little, then a little more as she bumped her shoulder hard against it.
Sunlight streamed in through the gap along with a large clump of snow that fell with a splat onto the floor.
Well, that explained the problem with opening the door. A drift of snow, at least four feet high, had piled against the outer door. She thumped the flat of her arm against the door, each time she hit it, the door budged a little bit more until there was just enough room for them to kick the snow away and squeeze through.
The early morning sun bounced painfully off the top layer of snow, blinding them both momentarily as they stepped from the darkness of the corridor into the open daylight.
Thor was off in a heartbeat, leaping like a fox through the snow that came up to his belly.
Emily, her hand pressed against her forehead to shade her eyes, scanned the field of white for any indication of the building that Jacob had talked about.
At the top of an embankment about three hundred feet or so away, past several mounds of snow that were probably buried cars, Emily saw a large building, its roof heavy with snow and its white sides blending almost seamlessly into the surrounding scenery.
Parked outside the entrance were several large dump trucks.
“I think that’s where we need to go,” she said to Rhiannon. The girl looked like an Eskimo bundled up in her thermal trousers and parka, her warm breath condensing in the frigid air like smoke from a baby dragon.
“’Kay.” Another puff of white filled the air.
The pair, flanked by Thor, trudged their way toward the building, the fresh powder crackling and crunching beneath their boots.
By the time they crested the embankment leading up to the building, Emily knew this had to be the right place. It was about the size of an aircraft hangar. They stood in front of two huge fold-back doors, both of which were closed and locked tight. A door on the left of the building opened when she twisted the knob, and they stepped into a small office area with a back wall made entirely of shatterproof glass that looked out into the darkness of the hangar’s interior space.
A set of filing cabinets and a small desk with a computer occupied most of the room. Fixed to the wall next to a second door leading out into the hangar was a corkboard with paper fliers and notices pinned to it. Beneath the corkboard was a metal frame from which hung several sets of keys.
There didn’t appear to be any windows in the main part of the building, and with the main doors closed, the interior beyond the office was dark as night. Emily hadn’t thought to bring the flashlight and didn’t much care to trudge all the way back through the snow to fetch it. If she had to, she would, but she decided to see if she could figure out a way to open the doors and let some light into the building first. Much like she had with the garage door back at the Jeffersons’ house, she surmised there had to be a way to manually open them.
She opened the second door leading into the main hangar and asked Rhiannon to stand in the doorway and keep it ajar for her. A thin pathway of light filtered out from the office. It wasn’t much, but it was at least enough for her to be able to make out the shape of the two main outer doors. Stepping into the larger space, she edged over to the double doors, pausing a minute as her eyes adjusted to the darkness.
Through the gloom Emily spotted a large metal handle protruding from a gray oblong box that came up to her waistline. It was secured to the floor by four bolts. A pulley system ran from the box and disappeared into the darkness high above her.
She took the handle firmly in both hands and rotated it once. The mechanism inside the box made a clacking sound as Emily turned the handle farther and the doors rattled like they’d been buffeted by a gust of wind. Two more turns of the handle and a laser-thin beam of light appeared at the center of the doors running from floor to ceiling. With each turn of the handle, the beam widened and grew, flooding the interior of the building with the sharp white light of the winter wonderland beyond its walls.
A few minutes later and both doors were fully opened. Emily dropped the hood on her parka, putting up with the sudden chill as the sweat on her forehead began to freeze.
“You all right?” asked Rhiannon.
“Fine,” Emily replied as she drew in deep icy breaths that stung her nose and throat. She beckoned the girl over to her side.
“Let’s find this thing and get out of here.”
Two rows of vehicles lined the interior of the storage building. A snowplow and a couple of trucks adapted to spread salt over icy roads waited off to her right. On the left was a second snowplow and, just beyond that, she saw a large bright-orange tracked vehicle that looked like it was designed for a science-fiction movie…or to traverse the snowy wastelands of this world, she thought. That could only be the Cat.
She walked over to the nearest side of the vehicle. It had four powerful-looking triangular tracks instead of wheels. Each was attached to a flat chassis on top of which sat a glass-encased four-door cab that contained two rows of seats. It looked like whoever had designed this machine had taken the cab from an eighteen-wheeler and dropped it onto a tank. In front of the cab was the squared-off engine compartment, and to the rear of the cab was a large silver tank that she assumed contained the fuel. Seven large windows in the cabin gave whoever was driving this thing a 360-degree field of vision.
An emblem etched on the engine compartment read TUCKER SNO-CAT.
“Wow,” said Rhiannon. “Are we going to be riding in that?”
It really was more like a tank than the SUV, Emily thought as she slowly circled the vehicle.