The first fat flakes began to fall at a quarter past six in the morning. On the highways the salt trucks and the snowplows stood ready, their amber lights twitching and spinning in the freezing air as the gentle light of dawn slipped in unnoticed behind the low hanging clouds. The weather bureau had announced a severe winter storm warning for the entire east coast near midnight, upgrading it to a blizzard warning at four a.m. The late night weathermen in loud ties were already forecasting this storm as one of the worst of the decade, if not of the entire century, long before it would be over.
"Over?" Tyler said aloud to himself. "It hasn't even started."
The radio was tuned to a local low watt AM station that featured, “talk, talk, talk, twenty-four hours a day!” The problem was that the only thing that they were talking about this morning was the damned storm and he was tired of it already. He'd been driving for six and a half hours at seventy miles per, heading eastward into the storm the entire time. The highway had been fairly empty except for the semis and the occasional battered cars that seemed to be heading home, like he was, their encapsulated drivers focused intently on the road ahead.
At around three o'clock in the morning an old Country Squire station wagon had shot past him with a full sized Christmas tree strapped to the roof rack, brown, needle bare and clean as a plucked turkey, it's empty branches quivering at a mile a minute in the frozen winter air. The driver was a guy in his forties, with a huge dirty shock of stiff gray hair, disheveled and wild and standing on end. He was gripping the wheel tightly in his fists at the two and ten position, staring gravely ahead into the darkened night. Tyler wondered what his story was, wondered if the Christmas tree had been strapped to the top of his car since Christmas, already three weeks past. Did he come home with the tree and find himself in an empty house? A fire gutted apartment surrounded by yellow tape fluttering in the December darkness? Maybe a Dear John letter tacked upon the door? Or did he go off for a tree one day and just breakdown somewhere out there along the way and forget where it was that he was going? It killed a good twenty minutes just thinking about it, putting himself in the guy's place, wondering what his wife would think if he didn't come home at all. Would she survive without him, he wondered? It made him sad to think about things like that, so he stopped and fiddled with the radio again as the signal faded out. After all, here he was, happier than he could ever remember being in his entire life, on his way home to the woman he loved, waiting for him in their soft, warm bed.
The roads were dry and the air was still and the temperature stood at twenty-eight degrees.
It was obvious that a big storm was on its way, if you knew anything about those kinds of things at all. You didn't need the charts with the cold fronts spiked in blue and the warm fronts in scalloped red swells laid out like war plans to tell you what was what. You didn't need the numbers or the terms: thirty point five and falling, Arctic Clipper and Nor'Easter. You could hear it, you could see it, and you could certainly feel it, deep inside your bones, a certain emptiness that hung like a pall on the trees. He looked at the odometer and quickly figured that he had less than ninety miles left to go. He'd departed the night before, opting to out race the approaching blizzard rather than to spend another night trapped in Akron. If he made it and he'd guessed he would, then the two of them would have the next twelve days together, isolated by the storm in their little farmhouse, cozy and alone and safe with each other. She had told him she'd just gone shopping and that their pantry was filled. And she also said that she had a couple of bottles of champagne waiting in the fridge for when he got in.
I won't be in until early morning. He'd said.
I'll wait. She'd purred back through the wires.
He'd left right then.
Once he was inside the truck he switched on the radio and all the talk from that point on was about the storm. He'd listened to his tapes for a while after that, singing along until his voice went raw, when he switched the radio back on.
"...Under no circumstances should travel be attempted for any purpose other than absolute emergencies. As we have been reporting for the past several hours this is shaping up to be a monster of a storm. Reports from as far south as Birmingham, Alabama show the snow coming down in record setting amounts. Atlanta is already looking at sixteen inches and falling. The nation's capital has three feet on the ground and all non-essential government offices are closed. Wow! We'll be back after this word from our sponsor."
He hit the scan button several times through both bands and the story was the same on every station. It almost came as a relief when the first clotted clumps of downy snow began to hit the windshield just before dawn.
"Here we go." he whispered to no one at all as he flipped the wipers on.

The National Weather Service was as busy as beaver in a floodplain according to the deejay in Harrisburg. The airports had been shut down one at a time as the winds and the snow got the better of the maintenance crews. Dulles, Baltimore, Wilmington, Philly and Newark fell, one after another, like dominoes. By dawn all drivers were banned from state roads in a dozen states. Coastal towns were in the process of evacuation from South Carolina to the Chesapeake Bay and they said that the worst of it hadn't even hit yet. Out on the turnpikes in all kinds of places people, long used to the Chicken Little syndrome that the weather guys spouted off about, found themselves trapped in their cars and in their trucks, isolated from wherever it was that they were headed, with only a gas tank between themselves and a lonely frozen death. Kids who at first thrilled to the sight of the snow were forbidden from going out into it as the temperature dropped and the drifts mounted. It was a textbook Nor'Easter of mammoth proportions and it looked, even by conservative estimates to be exactly the kind of storm that would make it into the record books. Two to three feet were predicted from Raleigh to Boston and as far inland as the Ohio River valley. It seemed that a freak Atlantic El Nino had come up out of the gulf and then stalled while an unusually powerful Canadian cold front continued to pump an endless supply of frigid Arctic air. Unfortunately, as luck would have it neither one showed even the slightest sign of waning.
It was a bad one, by anyone’s standards.

He was becoming drowsy. The snow, which had started so elegantly in thick puffy clumps that drifted vertically toward the naked earth, had turned into something else altogether. It began to spit down in frozen kernels, yellowish and round in the headlamps, swirling in a desperate profusion toward him.
This looks bad, he thought as the he passed a sign that read, Philadelphia 57 Miles. Ahead of him he could see the taillights of a spreader truck spraying its saline cargo in a flat white arc across the snowbound lanes. The blacktop, barely visible beneath the wildly spinning snow, took the salt soundlessly. Tyler began to scan the radio for information concerning his home, less than seventy miles away. Behind his eyes he felt a pressure beginning to build.
Outside the wind began to howl.
In thirty years, Tyler had seen a lot. Eight years on a sub with the Navy. South Pacific, Adriatic, Straights of Hormuz. He'd seen wind spouts and sundogs, northern lights and a Tsunami. He'd seen lightning bolts that lasted nearly fifteen seconds and an artillery bombardment that went on for seventy-five hours, but he had never seen a storm like this before in his life. Within fifteen minutes his wipers began to freeze up as they clack, clack, clacked against the icy windshield. Not long after that he began to notice the other cars marooned along the side of the road, the ones that weren't able to handle the crosswinds as he had or the black ice that had built up on the roadway. Maybe you ought to stop, he heard himself say.
Maybe you'd better.
But he kept on driving.
He thought about Natalie, nervous at home, waiting for his headlights to appear down the lane. Where they lived there wasn't much traffic at all. They had a little place at the far end of town where the telephone lines and cable service and the public water petered out. I'll be home for breakfast, he had told her and he knew that she believed him. Still, in his head he thought as he drove, What if I don't make it? What if I don't make it home at all?
He stared ahead at the horizon, what little he could see of it through the windshield, the snow swirling at him in a rage and he thought. What happens if I don't get home at all?

At the end of a long gravel driveway in the heart of the Delaware Mountains sat a small white house. Inside the house sat a woman at a table. She was drinking champagne from a jelly jar and crying to herself, a cat purring softly on her lap. Outside the wind was blowing hard as the morning bleached the sky. In the hallway a grandfather clock began to chime, once, twice and then again and again until the stroke of seven...

When it became light enough to see it was apparent that there was a problem at hand. The street clearing operations were quickly defeated when gale force winds replaced the snow faster than the plows could move it. There were the homeless to deal with and the fires that were sure to break out, were breaking out already, and the travelers, the hundreds of thousands of people on the roads that had places to go, people to meet, things to do. No one ever thought that a storm like this, a real storm, would have the kind of impact that it would have. On the highways people who were driving along blinded by their frozen windshields stopped in the middle of the highways to clear them and the others, with frozen windshields that plowed into those cars from behind, never seeing them until they hit. And the fact of the matter was it had barely just begun.
By seven-thirty the shit began to hit the fan. In a ten mile stretch between exit twenty-five and twenty-seven Tyler had counted twelve tractor-trailers jack-knifed on the turnpike and more than sixty cars marooned along it's edge. He was shooting for exit twenty-eight, hoping like hell that route one would still be open. From there he had less than thirteen miles to home; a short stretch along Scotch Road just past the Delaware and then a five mile run up State highway 31 If worse came to worse he could walk his way up route 518. He knew all the windbreaks and he knew how to stay warm if he had to, skirting the hedgerows and the Stony Brook wall. Fact was, whatever he had to do, he knew that he was going to make it home. He had an extra sweater behind the seat and a space blanket folded neatly in the back of the cab.
The storm however, had begun to expand. There wasn't a space outdoors that wasn't occupied by either a bitter wind or a frozen drift. Snow had begun to get inside the truck and Tyler had no idea how. The wind buffeted the pick-up and he felt as if he had to hold the wheel tightly or he would loose control completely. He drove slower and slower, thirty-five, thirty, twenty-five, then twenty...A state police cruiser passed him at one point and the driver, a younger white male with a shaved head gave him a look that chilled him to the bone. Get off the road, he mouthed silently as he passed. On the radio a newsbreak confirmed that the worst of the storm was yet to come...

At nine a.m. the governor of New Jersey went on the air to declare a statewide emergency. Absolutely no one was to attempt to drive on any state road other than emergency and public works vehicles. At nine-o-five Tyler found his exit. It looked as if it had never been plowed at all. The fact was that the emergency vehicles had come through less than twenty minutes earlier clearing a swath big enough for a truck, as if anyone actually thought that one would come through by that point. The last of the tractor-trailers had all given up at a quarter past eight. Five minutes after that the toll collectors had defected en masse, heading home or where ever they could get to before the storm swallowed them whole. The toll plaza was like a ghost town when Tyler pulled up to it. Every lane had a green light flashing overhead and the halt bars were all raised to let the last of the Mohicans through. There was a red Miata wedged sideways into one of the toll gates, it's front end smashed in, white exhaust fumes puttering from the rear end like cigar smoke. Tyler picked an empty slot in the plaza and shot his truck through. The exit itself proved a little difficult. His Ford began to slide out from the rear, clipped a cleared section of road top and finally skittered back to the left. The steering wheel slid through his hands like a foreign object, shaking one moment, clutching suddenly and then breaking free in a flash the next, like something in a dream. The driving was next to impossible, each yard a gift, each mile a wish come true. From the turnpike Tyler drove down route one through a gang of gathering drifts, the bottom of the truck striking the backbone of the drifts like a schooner on a choppy sea. It took over an hour to make it to the Interstate 95 exit, a piece of road less than ten miles in length. From a distance Tyler saw that a semi had gone off the ramp and crashed into the median strip. Before he had any time to think he swung the wheel to the right and rode the truck up through the drifting snow of the approach lane, inching past the WRONG WAY and the DO NOT ENTER signs. If anyone had been coming from the other direction there would have been a head-on collision, and if the conditions been even slightly different he never would have tried it at all. Somehow the wheels spun fast enough, gathering enough purchase with each revolution to carry him to the top of the ramp where the truck slid wildly to the left, fishtailed twice and neatly slipped back into the fresh grooves cut into the highway by the road crews. From here on it was no longer a question of ability or skill, but rather one of luck. He knew it and he crossed his fingers to himself. It was morning, but it was as dark as if it were midnight. The snow came down in a swirling mass, trying to hypnotize him and lead him off the road like a Siren.

In D.C. the politicians scrambled to get out of town. Half of them would be successful and half of them would... Well.
In Baltimore the snow came down in sheets, by the buckets full, in an unrelenting fall, covering everything in a soundless blanket of white.
In Georgia over one hundred people had died during the first hour of the storm. The temperature had dropped from 55 degrees to 11 below in less than an hour. The ones who decided to tough it out wound up doing exactly that.
They toughed it out, to death.

Tyler thought that he could see about thirty-five feet, max. The snow was coming down so hard that the entire world was less than the size of a house. The trees at the edge of the road looked like the clouds and the clouds looked like nothing at all. The snow came down in alternating waves, heavy and relentless, deliberate and unceasing. The heater blew at it's top speed as the temperature in the cab dropped. The radio was trying to compete with the sound of the blowers and it was losing. Nothing they said was sounding very good anyway. He was breaking about a thousand laws as it was just staying on the road but he knew he wasn't about to be stopped as long as he kept moving. The fact was that he wasn't sure there was anyone left to stop him. He hadn't seen a vehicle moving on the road since he had left the turnpike and he was nearly to the Delaware River. There were a few flares burning next to a half buried car and a guy standing next to it in a big blue parka waving his arms like a madman when Tyler hit the Pennsylvania side of the bridge. He was sure that he could see a couple of heads inside the car, kids maybe, but then he thought of his wife and his promise to her and then he began to think of himself and he drove by, looking away. The wind on the bridge was unbelievable. An anemometer would have read seventy knots, but Tyler had no way of knowing that. The truck was buffeted by gale force winds that made it slip and slide, first to the right and then to the left. Below him the river tightened like molasses, scuds of snow and clotted ice breaking apart, drifting and then sticking back together until the water began to seize up like a bad engine, licked by the wind.

Inside a house at the end of a lane, if you listened hard enough, you could hear the sound of the operator telling no one at all that ...if you feel that you have dialed in error please hang up and dial again... and the sound of a cat meowing to go outside along with the howling of the wind.

Snow.

A single drop of water frozen into a perfect, unique crystal outfitted with eight points. It is formed when water vapor freezes instantly, a by-product of colliding air masses; frigid cold winds and warm moist air duking it out over, as a rule, some land mass. Great snowfalls have blanketed the world before. As a rule they are confined to those places where few choose to live, or prepare for it with a studied diligence learned from a hundred generations before them. Blizzards have at times made exceptions. The Great Plains of the United States in 1888, the Russian Steppes of 1942, and Tjakistan in 1770 when snow fell for thirty one days without a break, over two hundred and sixty inches on a population that lost over 90 percent of its inhabitants.
But it had never snowed like this before, not ever.

The exit for the valley was gone. The headlights poked at the snow that had drifted heavily from the river on, big waves of it piled here and there where the tree lines and hedgerows pulled away from the fields. The winds, howling walls of them already packed with snow, pushed what was already on the ground before them, pressing the powder into hillocks and knolls, pregnant rounded swells that fell upon themselves and then swirled and chased each other off into the steely darkness, one after another without end. The last of the salt trucks and the snowplows had either stuck with the interstates or more likely, had headed for safety before the snow proved too much for them. But either way, the side roads had been ignored and the exits were snow packed, clogged and impassable now.
Tyler gave it a try anyway.
He had the wheel locked tightly in his grip, turning it slightly to account for the sweeping curve of the exit and the truck picked up speed as it began downgrading, three hundred and fifty hypothetical horses reining themselves in under his touch. The snow bank ahead was as still as a beached whale and thoroughly invisible in the swirling blizzard. He slammed into it as if it were a wall.
The impact threw him forward like a rag doll. The safety belt harness cut into his left shoulder at the point where his neck joined his collarbone, the nylon strap stripping a four-inch wide fillet of skin to the shiny muscle beneath as he shot like a rocket from his seat. The wheel snapped from his hands with a crack and what looked like a huge spider web appeared suddenly before his eyes as the windshield exploded in a shower of glass. There was an eruption of sound, a screeking caterwaul and finally a moment when there were no sounds at all.
A hush filled the cab of the truck.
He sat there, in his own stunned silence for a moment, his face wet with melting snow that had begun to blow in through a hole in the windshield where his head had struck it in the crash. There was a thin trickle of blood that ran from an inch long gash across the bridge of his nose.
Tyler tried to get his bearings. His head felt as if it had been struck with a finely swung baseball bat. All around him was a subdued whiteness, an ethereal glow and the sound of snow falling and of wind; a cold hard wind tearing at the hole in the windshield and at the edges of the truck. The temperature inside was unbearable, nearly as cold as it was outside, he thought. Tyler tried to move and was shocked by a jolt of pain that threatened to black him out. It started somewhere deep inside his neck, a white-hot point of agony that ran through the center of his shoulder and down the entire length of his arm to his fingertips. He felt his body convulse for a second and he reacted by pushing back into the bench seat. There was an explosion of the senses, the feeling of death without the relief it brought followed by a moment of bright swirling lights when he felt ads if he might pass out from pain. In time it subsided to a manageable agony.
Two things became clear at once; that his shoulder was broken, badly, a marrow flecked tip of bone already poking through his sweater, confirming the fact. That of course and the slightly scarier fact that if he didn't start moving and soon, he would freeze to death out here by himself, trapped in his ruined pickup. He slid from consciousness once, twice, then lost count it seemed, before snapping awake from pain and the sting of gelid air.
The truck was stalled in a snow bank that looked to be over ten feet tall, although he couldn't be sure. Occasionally the wind would abate just enough so that he could see the top of it through the swirling white of the storm, but then it would begin again, driving vertical sheets of snow downward so that nothing appeared beyond the frigid glass. With his good arm he tried to start the engine, but it coughed only once, sputtered and died and after that the starter ground itself out and the interior lights went dim, dimmer, then dimmed out altogether. Luckily he had worn his coat in the truck although he had unzipped it and was finding it nearly impossible to work the zipper with one frozen hand. His shoulder was screaming like a thousand chainsaws, the pain taking on a life of it's own. His eyes filled with tears of anguish, overflowed and then froze on his face.
In the darkness of the truck he began to scream. Not anything coherent at first just a loud gurgling howl that rose and fell like the wind outside. He used up all the air in his lungs from the effort, began to say his wife's name over and over again like a mantra as he caught his breath and then he started to scream again.
Outside the sounds of his cries went less than a few yards from the truck before being carried away, effortlessly on the wind.

The nation was glued to the television, watching the storm. It was, after less than six hours, officially the worst single blizzard in the history of the United States. In the areas hardest hit by the storm, or The Big One, as it was being called by the weathermen, the cable services had almost all gone out. The newscasters that were unlucky enough to be trapped in the studios with their crews, continued to broadcast. The news wasn't good. Satellite photos showed that the system had stalled over the coast and there was no foreseeable end in sight. The Arctic air was only beginning to pump up the volume. The people in the studios tried to talk about what it would be like afterwards, about the stories you could tell your grandkids and how this was going to be one for the record books, and they tried to do it with a smile, but they looked scared. You could tell.
And then the power went out. Soon after that, the phones went silent, too.

Tyler was alive. He knew from the excruciating jolt of pain that he felt with every step he took. He had fashioned a crude pair of snowshoes from the seat covers of the truck, perhaps the only advantage he had in moving through the mounting drifts. His arm hung limp at his side, numb from the elbow down to his fingertips. Above that deadened flesh, at a point halfway to his shoulder, there was an electric current that sent lightning bolts of harrowing pain throughout his left side, from the top of his head to soles of his feet, whenever he moved a step. And he had to move, had to keep moving because his life depended on it. He knew that if he stopped, for even a second that it would all be over. He thought of his wife, waiting for him in their home, waiting in the warmth of their small house, with candles burning. He thought about what she smelled like and how she felt in his arms at night. He was able to see the soft down on the back of her neck and hear the sweet song of her voice calling to him. It was only a dream, a vision brought on by his pain, but it was fueled by his heart and kept him moving forward one step at a time. He knew that she needed him there. She would be worried about him. If he could just make it the last mile or so he knew that it would all work out, somehow...
What was that? Tyler thought, his head jerking up at a bluish flash coming from the endless wall of snow before him.
Ahead of him in the swirling thick of it all he was sure that he saw... something, maybe, a trick of the eyes, or advancing snow blindness. Death, perhaps.
There it is again! This time he was sure, absolutely certain that he saw something in front of him, a light, pulsating in rhythm with the throbbing of his arm, just up ahead in the near twilight of flakes and air. He thought that his mind was starting to play tricks on him with the unforgiving cold and the pain and the sound of the wind, howling like a dying man in his ears. He had already been out in the snow for over two hours. His clothes were stiff with ice. He was starving, frozen and in shock. He knew that his chances of making it were growing smaller and smaller. He was, after all, a practical man. He had weighed everything carefully before wrapping himself up as tightly as possible against the storm with his one good arm and leaving what had been, for awhile anyway, the relative safety of his truck. In all the time he had walked, dragging his dead arm with him, he was sure that he was still over a mile from town. From there it was another half a mile to their home, uphill all the way.
He was sure he saw something now, a flash-flash-flash of blue light, near the place where Cahoolamonsa Road turned westward towards the river. His right hand was buried deep in his jacket against the cold. He'd only been able to find one glove after the accident, and that one he'd pulled onto his paralyzed left hand to protect it from frostbite. Somewhere along the way it too had been lost, falling into the swirling carpet of snow somewhere behind him. He looked at his hand and it was the color of cold dead ash. He couldn't feel it but he knew that he was going to loose the hand soon if he didn't get inside. He tried jamming the loose hand in the coat pocket but the flash of pain that he felt almost made him blackout, so he let it swing free again. He thought briefly about wrapping his knit cap around it, but remembered that he had heard somewhere that you loose over seventy percent of the body's heat through the top of the head and he wanted to live more than he wanted to save his arm, and he saw that light ahead of him, definite now, flashing insistently in an eerie, icy blue, the color of his frozen fingers.

The Storm. That was all that anyone had to say and everyone within the reach of a television or a radio knew what it was they were talking about. Out on the west coast, where disaster was inevitable, they sighed in collective relief. For once they were not the victims of the capriciousness of the elements, the mudslides and earthquakes and the sudden firestorms that defined their lives. For once they were the observers of a disaster at the far end of the continent. And in this capacity they were able to sympathize, like a mother for her child, for what their eastern counterparts were going through.
The Storm. It had, in a matter of twelve hours, enveloped the entire Eastern coast, from the orange groves of Orlando to the rocky shores of Bar Harbor, leaving the populace of twenty states buried like the dead in their homes and cars. It had cut off the towns from the cities, neighbors from neighbors, and in places unknown, husbands from their wives. The military on alert at twenty bases stood ready on the tarmacs as the rumors flew. No one knew when the storm would abate and no one knew what they would find when they finally were able to get in there to begin the rescue effort. At eight P.M. the last of the radio stations in the northeast lost what little power their generators had mustered and fell into a soft, silent oblivion.

It took Tyler twenty minutes to reach the highway patrol car. It had stalled, like his own truck had, face down in a snow bank. It was the glow of the light bar mounted on the roof that had led him to it, to safety. The cruiser was empty but its engine was running. It took him several minutes to clear enough snow from around the door to open it, but once he had he was met with a blast of hot air still pounding from the defroster. He thought about the risks of breaking into a State Troopers car, (and it was, he ascertained from the code book that he found on the seat, a trooper's car), into State property, but he knew he had no other choice. In his mind he thought about the confrontation he would have with the officer when he came back, but after an hours time had passed, he knew that he would not likely see him again, if at all. He wondered, between brief moments of unconsciousness or sleep, what could have sent the Trooper out into the storm, on foot, when he had a radio and warmth, however temporary, inside the patrol car.
A radio. Tyler sat up instantly behind the broad steering wheel, the excitement that he felt when he realized there was a means of communicating with others threatening to overwhelm him. He was giddy with the thought of it; the gray-black handset, the gleaming silver toggle switches and the active glow of the scanner mounted on the dash before him. Salvation. He leaned forward at an impossible angle it seemed, from the broad bench seat. He had to prop himself in place with his feet, the wild tilt of the car pitching him towards the windshield. That was the reason the cop had gone off, he thought. His car had run off into a drainage ditch. Lucky the rear end was aiming skyward, leaving the tailpipe open so that the engine wouldn't cough out. The State Police headquarters wasn't far, although it was hard to know for sure where he was, exactly. Maybe the guy had snowshoes. Who knew? Maybe he had radioed in and they had sent a snow machine out for him. Maybe they had rescued him. Maybe they could save him too. This was bad, sure, but it wasn't like the whole world was shut down. It was only a storm, that's all, just a storm. It wasn't like he was just going to die out here by himself. He was stupid to have left his truck, that's for sure, because they would have found him by now. A million thoughts ran by in a procession, one after the other, like a train filled with words, incoherent fantasies to keep him from actually picking up the handset and clicking it's button. He was afraid.
Half in shock he finally held the handset in his frozen grip and squeezed the squelch - Dot, dot, dot - dash, dash, dash - dot, dot, dot. S.O.S.
A minute passed, maybe two. He tried again and after a moment a third time.
The dead air crackled. The wind continued to howl.
And then, as if from a million miles away, he heard a voice.
"Hello?" The sound of a woman’s voice said softly. "Is someone there?"
Tyler stared at the speaker, thinking he had hallucinated the voice, unsure already whether he had heard anything at all.
And then it happened again, a note of urgency in the voice this time.
"Hello? Is anyone there? Anyone?"
Tyler squeezed again, his thawing digits ablaze.
"Yes! I'm here! I'm trapped and I'm hurt! I need help!"
The air filled with a quick burst of static, then died.
"Please answer me." he croaked, his voice filled with exhaustion.
The radio squealed and throughout a broken jumble in response he heard only a few scattered words, sergeant...snowstorm...help us... then nothing else.
For the next hour he scanned and switched through every channel half a dozen times. Only channel nine, he discovered, came in at all, and even then he could only listen, not transmit. At first it was reassuring, to hear the voices out there, but too soon it became chilling. There were so many others out there just like him and there appeared to be no help coming for anyone. The storm was getting worse, the drivers were stranded, and their fuel was running low. One by one they fell silent until the only sound on the airwaves was the plaintive appeal that Tyler made, squeezing off an ingeminate tattoo against the relentless storm.
Dot, dot, dot - dash, dash, dash - dot, dot, dot.
S.O.S.

Tyler awoke to the sound of the radio and it's blips and vowels skipping across the dead air like an electric current. The blowers on the dash forced cold air into the cruiser as the storm outside howled. The big engine, having spent the last of its fuel, had given up the ghost. The heavy-duty battery taking over for the alternator provided the juice for the radio and the blower motor long after the gas had run out. All around him, Tyler sensed the pressure of cold dead air.
He had no way of knowing how long he had slept, an hour certainly, perhaps longer. The dreams he had experienced had been disquieting. Giants and icy soldiers, tall dark men with sharp knives hidden in their jackets; they were there with him, under the bed and in closets. He remembered them as if they had been real, slowly at first as he opened his sleep crusted eyes, after that the reality of his situation. The storm and his desperate flight home, the accident followed by a demoralizing trudge through endless drifts, an agonizing rout that fed on exhaustion of a thousand lifetimes. His arm, he had begun to realize, would never make it. There were dark red bruises that extended from the top of the elbow and reached his shoulder. Below that was black and swollen and lost. The skin had ruptured in spots and leaked a yellowish sap that had solidified into a lacy fringe along the sleeve. The fingers looked like frozen sausage, fat and gray and dead, dead, dead. Stunned by his condition and the realization of his loss he began to cry fat frozen tears dragging tracks across his reddened cheeks, then caught himself and stopped just as suddenly. He knew that he would need all the strength he had and that an arm was only an arm. He had priorities. His had his wife, the girl he had met in fifth grade. And she was his forever, regardless. An arm hardly mattered at all.
The cruiser was dark now except for the amber glow of the radio, flickering sporadically in the bluish haze of the passenger compartment. He fumbled at the climate controls with his good hand, flicked on the AM/FM band by accident and listened to the momentary squeal of nothing at all; a hanging sound like space that lasts forever even longer than the sound itself. There were no stations left on the air, up or down the radio dial, none at all.
Tyler thought about his options and he thought about his wife.
He was, at best, a mile from his home.
There was, at least, six feet of snow.
It was conceivable, no change that, it was possible that he might...But he refused to consider that thought, not now at any rate.
The State Trooper who had left his car behind had also left his shotgun. It was a twelve gauge Remington, blued steel with a burled walnut stock. It looked as if it were about fifty years old. There were three notches carved into the stock, half an inch apart. Five rounds of double ought buck, red plastic tubes, glistened on its sling. A sixth shell sat cleanly in the breech. He stared at the weapon, glinting in the dark as if it held the answers. There was an unopened Snickers bar lying on the seat beside it with a clipboard and a Thermos jug, and a lacquered black baton with a leather thong threaded through the hilt.
Tyler wolfed the candy bar down, biting into the paper and all. It was a ravenous meal, filled with grunts and moans, followed with a torrent of lukewarm coffee that he gulped and spilled from the silver thermos.
For a moment he sat there, trembling in the terrible gray, half of his body numb with cold and the other half screaming in unrelenting pain. He gathered himself against it all and pulled his armor tightly about him.
He thought that he heard voices and some of them were his.
Natalie. He said into the swollen air.
He wasn't sure, but he thought that she may have answered him back.
Natalie. He said again
Tyler picked up the gun in his good hand, hefting it as if it was his own. The snow outside had piled up against the doors of the cruiser making it impossible to open them from the inside out. He'd tried. Twice. No go. He knew what it meant to him, locked in a patrol car, stranded without gas. He was trapped inside a steel tomb for the second time in one night. He thought up titles for this one like the kind they have in The Globe. Man entombed in numbing vivisepulture. Thoughts like this made him reconsider.
Outside he knew he would never survive; never make it that final mile or more to their home. If he did, he would kick in the door if he had to and then board it up somehow if he could from the inside and explain it to his landlord later, but he knew that he would never get the chance if he stayed locked up in here. No chance, no way.
And he thought about that for a while.
His mind flipped back and forth in voices one voice filled with hope while the second one raised its doubts.
Outside the storm began to intensify. Fat clots of crystalline snow clumped together and whirling in a vortex at the windshield, a cyclonic corkscrew pressing itself endlessly into the glass before him.
Once upon a time he had fought against the elements in a situation not much different from this. It was years ago when he was only a teenager. He had shoveled walks for his grandparents and their friends all around town for pocket money whenever it snowed. He worked the drifts with his friends James and Joey using broad aluminum shovels on the fluff or the slush, a single scoop at a time. He could remember what it was like chugging Morning Thunder tea like it was milk. The two of them, or three, depending on the weather, would work the old folk's places one at a time, up one street and down another taking the tens and the occasional twenties into their sweaty palms with teen-aged gravelly voiced thank-yous, as cold as the fallen snow. One night, long after they had finished shoveling the walks, he had started on his way home as a thick blanket of snow clouds rolled in above him. James had told him to wait for a ride from Joey, that they were all heading out to go skating, as if that would be possible in the coming squall, and they would give him a ride to the farm on their way. He thought about it for a while but rejected the offer, saying instead that he would walk home instead, cutting across the Baptist graveyard. Out there on the edge of the dead world where the bodies of others that had passed had finally come to rest in the cold, cold ground. He took off with his shovel making good time at first until he walked into the cemetery. The wind had come up at the exact time when his energy had flagged and faltered, then failed him altogether and he found himself alone and exhausted standing among the gray-blue head stones of his forefathers, gasping for air in the night, frozen to his shoulders in the drifts, thinking that he too was dead as the snow began to fall from the sky.
He was found and luckily some say, and he remembered parts of that too. Little parts at least.
His friends had come out in the storm with their headlights blazing, out into the night looking for their friend, missing somewhere out there.
They found him finally, clinging to the gravestone of the town founder, exhausted and spent and crusted with frost and blue. They wrapped him in blankets and rushed him into Brazeleton, stiff and dying in the back seat of their car.
The doctors that night were good. They both were wired for competition and the frozen kid proved a point. Within an hour they'd brought him back twice and upgraded him off the critical list. Four days later he was released.
He found himself back at home, in his bed, without the memory of exactly how he had arrived there. He'd been saved somehow, by fate he supposed. And if he had been saved from that, it couldn't be for him to go like this, in another storm, on another day, so close to the cemetery where he almost came to rest so long ago.
He couldn't die out here by himself in the snow with his game arm twisting in the wind.
It wasn't his fate.
Ironic. Said another voice as loud as the peel of a bell. Then another.
Ironic
Tyler thought of his wife as he clenched the weapon in his hand. He swung it up slowly, banging it first on the door and then on the dash before bringing it up to his chest. With what little energy he could muster in his good arm he charged the shotgun with a loud clack, seating the shell in the breech.
Do it. A voice said icily into his ear.
His thumb flipped off the safety with a click and his fingertip fluttered at the blue steel trigger.
Do It. Screamed the voice this time.
The cold black barrel slid to the left, made tentative contact with his tear-streaked cheek. Tyler finding his aim at last could feel his control slipping away, his arm as taut as a rubber band.
Natalie, he whispered to no one at all as the gun went off with a roar.

I am a wife.
I will wait for my man.
I love him.
She places the pen on the pad and rolls over on the bed and falls asleep as the snow covers the windows outside.

The windshield lies in a million sparkling gems that catch the light of the interior windows. The air smells of cordite. He cannot hear the wind. Pain is no longer the issue.
Only survival.
Only survival.

The town of Pleasant Mills is located in the center of a valley. The earth is rich, courtesy of the glaciers that rolled through several hundred thousand years ago, carrying fertile topsoil like a bulldozer before it. Along the edges of the valley lie a rift of boulders scorched by the fires of a hundred generations of native peoples who built them for warmth and food and who knows what else. If you go by the historical record, there have been humans inhabiting this area for over twenty thousand years and Americans since the time of the Revolution. It had always been a place of winter refuge, it’s sloping walls of shale covered in thick forest and dotted with clean springs that pumped fresh water all year long. Those who made their homes along the bottomland tended bountiful gardens in the summer and hunted fat game all winter. It was a good place to live and after that to be buried.

How he made his way to the bottom of their field he would never know and it hardly mattered to him now. On a pleasant day he could have made it to the front porch in a minute or two at most, the dogs chasing him all the way. Now, up to his chest in snowdrifts he realized that he had come as far as he could and it was enough. He could see the dim orange glow of their kitchen when the wind abated and he no longer felt the pain of his injuries, nor the sting of the cold. In fact he felt warm, as if he were already inside, deep under the covers of their bed entwined in each others arms, whispering things that made them feel safe and loved. He knew that she was inside, that she would be just fine, even without him, knowing he’d tried to come as far as he had just to be able to close his eyes within sight of her.

Inside she slept fitfully, the wind howling outdoors and for a moment she woke in the frigid air of their bedroom and looked out over the fields to the tree line below and thought of him smiling at her before she fell back into sleep once more.