As if to mock him, more snow fell from the sky, piling up by the second. At the intersection of Cornell Road and 185th, they passed a particularly nasty traffic snarl. Cars sat locked together like copulating, metallic, praying mantises. Walt counted five cars in the pile-up. He counted more bodies than that trapped in the abandoned wrecks. Their bodies were mangled and twisted, trapped in driver seats by seatbelts. Snow blew in and out of the shattered windows of the vehicles, and the Annies inside waved to them with their broken arms and fingers and jaws.
Walt took the time to wave back, drawing a cockeyed glance from Day. Walt didn't mind. They continued onward, leaving the wreck behind.
****
Amanda estimated they had trudged three miles altogether before stopping, although the actual distance they traveled must have been something like five miles with all the twisting and turning they had done to lose the tail of the dead. They looped around buildings and through neighborhoods upon finding a likely resting spot. This time, they settled on a storage facility.
Amanda rolled her shoulders out. She and Rudy had carried Tejada for close to half the trip, only switching out when all three of them had tumbled face-forward into the snow. At that point, with some minor grumbling from Tejada, they gave over the duty of carrying the sergeant to Walt and Gregg. Tejada wasn't tall, but he was solid, and having him leaning on their shoulders for two-and-a-half miles was draining, especially as the snow piled up. Another half-foot of powdery flakes had accumulated while they had walked.
Once she was relieved of the heavy burden of Tejada, she felt like she was floating through the snow. Rudy, who had lived in Oregon most of his life, said he had never seen snow like this before. Amanda had only spent one winter in the state before this one, and it had been completely underwhelming, especially for someone from Florida. She remembered the first snow day at college like it was yesterday.
She had never seen snow in person before. There had only been a dusting on the ground when she woke up, maybe an inch or an inch-and-a-half of snow. The entire city of Portland shut down, and her college classes were canceled for the day, despite the fact that she lived on campus and could easily walk to class without risking her life. In the morning, she had gone out to the field in front of her dormitory and joined a couple of familiar students who had started building a snowman. With a piece of cardboard, they would run and scoop up the snow, leaving behind a cold stretch of bare grass. In this way, they were able to make a small, diminutive snowman sitting in a bare field of grass. By noon, the thing was half melted and unrecognizable as a snow personage.
And that was it for snow for last year. There had been a couple of days of freezing rain that had fallen on the weekend, unfortunately, and then nothing else. This weather, this blizzard, was quite the shift. She wondered what was happening to the world. Was this weather a response to the fact that humans were now gone? Was this what weather had always been like before humans had covered the earth? Before man had changed the very composition of the air, had Portland always been covered in snow? Did the tribes that lived here spend the fall stocking up on supplies in order to make it through the inevitable blizzards. For a wild second, she felt like reaching for her cell phone and googling the question. But that time was over now. And so was the time of man. She felt sure of it. There was no way to come back from this.
Man's time was up, and now mother nature was trying to finish the job that the Annies had started. But they weren't going to make it easy for her. If mother nature wanted to come after her, Amanda was going to go down swinging.
They decided to rest at a storage facility. It was one of the strangest storage facilities she had ever seen. A wrought-iron fence surrounded a cube-shaped building. The building rose into the air, three-stories tall. The bottom story was windowless, but long, continuous glass windows ran down the side of the top two floors, and by the cold, gray light of the fading day, she could make out the bright orange doors of individual storage units.
The gate was electric, so the only way in was to climb up and over the fence. The hardest part was getting Tejada over. The top of each wrought-iron bar was tipped with a spike that made them think twice about even attempting to break in, but, in the end, they couldn't ask for a better place than one with its own locked gate and a fence around the perimeter to keep the dead out.
Allen and Epps clambered up the fence like two kids climbing a cyclone fence in their backyard. Then Masterson and Brown, the tallest of the soldiers, boosted Tejada up. Tejada grabbed the top of the fence, and Masterson and Brown spun his legs around so Epps and Allen could receive the weight of his lower body. They rotated his legs so that he was on the other side of the fence, and then they lowered him gently to the ground. All of this was done with quite a hefty bit of swearing and pained grunting on Tejada's part.
With that accomplished, Rudy and Amanda were next. It was always that way. Amanda sort of resented the fact that the soldiers always made sure she and Rudy were out of harm's way first, but it was advantageous at times. As Rudy and Amanda dropped into the snow
