The clouds overhead moved fast. Robby could tell because an occasional break in the clouds let through bright, sharp moonlight. The view changed from soft blue to sharp black and white until the next set of clouds diffused the light again. Before him, the lot looked like a very complex model built by a very morose child. It possessed all the right elements—cars, buildings, people, trees—but it looked too still in the moonlight. It was an underexposed still-life.
Robby ate chips on the right side of his mouth and draped sweatshirts over his legs like miniature blankets.
He glanced up every now and then to look for his father’s confident eyes in the visor mirror. It was too dark to see the resemblance, but Robby looked anyway.
“I trust you’ve abandoned your local extinction idea,” his father’s voice asked.
“Yeah,” Robby whispered in the dark. “It was just a working model. I told you that. Just a theory to test and use for decision-making until more evidence could be collected.”
“And what does your evidence tell you now?”
“Looks like something or someone malevolent has decided to take over,” Robby whispered.
“Thing? Or things?” his father’s voice asked.
“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 TEN
Inland - WINTER
THE 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.