Part 2 of Truck Drivers After Dark
Cold Start
Forty three below on Atigun Pass, a fuel filter closing up with wax, and a survival plan that would put Dana Miller exactly where the thing wants her.
Dana Miller came over the lip of Chandalar Shelf in ninth gear with forty tonnes of drill casing shoving at her back.
"Stay with me," she told the engine. "Seven miles. You can be sick in Deadhorse."
The engine leaned out, caught, leaned out again, and the steering went heavy in her fists in the same second.
"Okay," she said, hauling the rig back into the right-hand rut. "Okay. That's the filter."
Fuel. It was always fuel at forty below. Wax comes out of cold diesel in small flat crystals and mats onto the filter behind the left step, and the pump drags harder through less and less of it, and past a certain point the filter is a felt pad and the engine starves and quits.
She keyed the mike. "Anybody on nineteen. Miller, Kestrel Line, loaded northbound, mile two thirty seven. I am losing fuel pressure and I would like somebody to know that."
"Miller, Marchetti." A man's voice, flat and close. "I'm at the top. Two forty four. Been here since eight."
"Since eight. It's eleven."
"I know what time it is."
"What are you running for heat?"
"Nothing. She quit, the block's going cold, and my hands are past the stage where I can feel the mike."
A third voice came on, older, from the state camp two miles above her at Chandalar.
"Miller, this is Wes. I've been listening to him for an hour. Before you make a plan I want you to hear where you stand."
"Go ahead."
"Forty three below outside my door. We can't shoot the slopes under thirty five below. The gun tears itself up and the oil in it goes to jelly. Under forty below the hydraulics on the loaders quit on us. So if a path runs onto the road tonight I can't clear it, and we don't pretend otherwise. We call it a natural closure and we sit here until the weather picks."
"So nobody is coming up."
"My crews went off at six thirty and this road belongs to nobody until six. I've relayed to the troopers, and the troopers will tell you what I'm telling you. It may be many hours."
Forty three below. Her own gauge agreed, and the visitor guide in her door pocket had a cheerful line in it about wind chills to seventy below, which stops being a number the second you take a glove off.
"Wes, there's a Blow starting on the south side. Snow's coming off the shoulder sideways."
"I've got it on my side too. Miller, what do you do if she quits on the grade?"
"Shut the doors, get in the bunk, everything I own on top of me, and wait for six."
"That's the plan. Don't shut that engine off one minute before you have to."
"Believe me."
"Ivy Tarrant's running light out of Galbraith. I'll put her on you. Forty minutes, maybe. That's your help, and that is all of your help."
Seven miles left, and she knew every foot of them. Eight and a half kilometres over the top and down the far side, nine percent under the wheels on the average and over thirteen in places, with the lower tracks of more than forty avalanche paths crossing the road up there.
She could stop on the grade right now and change the filter. Spare in the side box, jug of anti-gel, gloves good for ninety seconds on bare steel. Or she could do it at the top, next to a man who was already freezing, where there would be two of them and one problem.
The engine hunted again.
"Marchetti. Bo. Talk to me all the way up. Tell me about your truck."
"There's frost on the inside of my windshield in a line."
"That's your breath."
"It isn't my breath. It started in the bottom corner and it's walking across. It's about at the middle now."
"Bo, get in the bunk. Everything you own on top of you."
"The hood's still warm. I had my hand on it twenty minutes ago and it was still warm and nothing went near it."
"Nothing went near what?"
Quiet on nineteen.
Then, small: "It's at my window."
"Bo."
"It's at my window and it isn't looking at the truck."
She drove the last two miles with her foot flat and the load shoving her toward the drop on the right.
Marchetti's rig sat on the crown, marker lights burning off the battery, hood standing open. She left her engine running and climbed down with a flare.
"Bo?"
His door hung open. The inside of the cab was white from floor to roof, a standing fur of frost on the vinyl, and what came out of the doorway was a different cold than the air.
She got back in her truck and locked the door, which was the stupidest thing she had ever done, and she did it anyway.
"Wes. Wes. His cab is frozen solid on the inside and he is not in it."
"Say again."
"Frost an inch thick on his seat. Both doors open. No tracks in the drift but mine. And there's a hand in the frost on the outside of his door glass, Wes. A whole hand, at the height of a man's face."
"Anything on the hood?"
"Nothing. Not the hood, not the stack, not the grille, and that's where every bit of his heat was."
Wes did not answer for a count of eight.
"Nineteen years back we found a rig on the north side. Idling. Warm. Doors shut, fuel in it, heater on, radio on. No driver, no tracks. I've never handed that to anybody sitting in a truck, because it only frightens people. Tonight it might do you some good."
"What happened to him?"
"Nobody knows. What I know is that it left a warm truck running and took the man out of it."
The frost started in the bottom corner of her own windshield, on the outside, and began to walk.
"Wes, it's on my windshield."
"Inside?"
"Outside. Bottom corner. It's walking."
It did not come in a straight line. It crossed the glass, turned, climbed, and stopped where her face was.
Her defroster was on high. Her engine was running at two hundred degrees. Her stack was throwing a plume six feet into the air. And the thing outside had walked past all of that and come to the one spot on all that steel that was warm and alive.
"Wes. I have had it backwards all night."
"Say it."
"It doesn't want the hottest thing. Metal is hot. Metal is no use to it. It goes to the brightest heat on the mountain, and a running truck is a dull little glow next to a person."
"That's why the boy's hood was warm and nothing touched it."
"It walked past his engine to get to him. Wes, my plan was to shut down and sit in his cab out of the wind."
"Don't."
"I know. In a cold cab I'm the only warm thing inside it. I'd be a candle in a jar with the lid screwed on. That's what happened to Bo, and he did nothing wrong except go cold."
"Then keep her running."
"She's down to eleven hundred and hunting. I've got four minutes of engine, and then the wax shuts that filter for good. How far off is Tarrant?"
"Fifteen minutes. Maybe twelve."
"Tell her not to stop on the crown. Past the sign, engine up, doors shut, and tell her to keep rolling whatever she sees."
"What are you doing?"
"Giving it something brighter than me."
"Miller, that's your whole load."
"It's a load."
"That's your truck."
"It goes to the brightest heat up here. I can't outrun it and I can't out-burn it sitting still. So for ten minutes I'm going to be the second brightest thing on this mountain. Twelve minutes for Tarrant. Past the sign."
"Say what you're doing so I hear it."
"Four flares, caps off, into my own bedding. Throttle wedged down with the jack handle. Door left open so the fire draws."
"Miller."
"Tell her past the sign, Wes."
She pushed the two dash buttons in, which lets the parking brakes off on the truck and the trailer together, and stepped down onto the ice.
Forty tonnes of casing went over the crown of Atigun and started down the south side with its curtains burning and its horn stuck, nine percent under it and nothing to hold it, and the light of it went down the mountain and lit the cuts of the avalanche paths one after another.
The frost that had been on her glass was not on her glass any more. It was going with it.
Snow is the best blanket there is. That's why a Blow can drift this road shut and everything under the drift comes through fine.
"Lee of his drive tyres," she said out loud, because saying it made it a plan. "Dig."
She dug with her mitts and her boot heels until she had a trench, then pulled the snow in over her legs, her chest, her face, and left one hand out with the last flare in it.
Nothing warm showing anywhere. That was the whole trick.
She counted, and lost track of what number she was on, which frightened her worse than the flare guttering did, because the shivering goes first and the confusion comes after it, and she had stopped shivering a while ago.
After confusion comes your own name, and she could still say hers, so she said it out loud, twice.
Air brakes cracked above her. Boots. A woman swearing steadily.
"Leave the hand," Dana said from under the snow. "The hand's fine. Get the rest of me."
"Arms up," Tarrant said, hauling. "Both of them. On three. In. Door."
"You're down two fingernails and I think two fingers."
"Get me off the crown."
"I'm going, I'm going. Your truck's burning about nine miles down the hill. It's burning like a refinery down there."
"Is it still going?"
"Honey, I can see it in my mirrors and I've got a mountain between us."
"Good."
"Good?"
"How long does a truck burn?"
"An hour? I don't know. Why?"
"Don't turn the heat up."
"Miller, you are frozen through."
"Tarrant. Don't turn the heat up."
Tarrant reached across and rolled the dial to max. The fan came on hot and loud, and the two of them sat in it and breathed.
In the bottom corner of Tarrant's windshield, on the outside, a small flat bloom of frost appeared, and began to walk.