Unit 4877 rang through at 9:52, flashing over two other active lines. It was early for Keith.
Tab, tab, c, tab. Kayla pulled his board card onto the left monitor to check his last ping before she tapped her headset. "Northline dispatch. You're showing at the Pilot on 371, that still right?"
"Yeah, sitting here."
"What's up?"
"My marker lights are out. Passenger side, both of them."
She was already scanning his last four days of logs. "Are you in line for the shop?"
"Third."
"Have you reached out to maintenance?"
"No, I thought you were supposed to."
"Maintenance first to start that process, then Operations," she corrected him. Drivers pacing a service desk were a liability—lingering, getting impatient, and pissing off the mechanics. It was always better to extract them from the situation and handle the shop politely from a distance. "I'll call them, see if I can bump you up." Tap. Gone.
Brandt was talking at her from planning, two rows over, without having come any closer.
She held up one finger to pause him, shoved the textbook off the desk phone so it dropped to the floor where it lived, and dialed the Rawlins shop. The shop's cell was garbage in that valley and always had been. She got a kid who sounded nineteen, told him 4877 was third in his line with a load appointment at fourteen hundred tomorrow, and typed shop, 371, in line into the notes field while the kid repeated the unit number back wrong twice.
"Seven seven," she said into the phone. "Four eight seven seven."
Brandt was still standing there.
"The Sioux Falls window is 0600 to 0800," he said. "He's showing 0745. 0745 is inside the window."
"Gate's locked at 0730. He's told you this. I've told you this." Tab, tab. She had the driver's clock up now, calculating his mandatory hours of service in her head. "It's going to be my problem at 0731."
"If the receiver's gate does not conform to the receiver's window, that's a receiver problem."
"Aye aye, captain," she said.
Brandt said, "Aye aye, captain" back, because he said it to everyone and he said it to the system and it had never once occurred to him that it was funny.
She fixed it herself. She moved the driver's dispatch plan up two hours, burned twenty minutes off his scheduled break, and made a note to apologize at six in the morning to somebody who was not Brandt.
The floor at night did not look like a place where anything happened. Day shift filled it. Three hundred people, standing arguments, and somebody always walking the center aisle with a printout held up like a summons.
On nights, the overheads sat at whatever the building considered adequate. The room stayed quiet enough that you could hear the strip under the monitors tick when it refreshed. Forty-one units. Two screens. A headset she had stopped noticing in her second month.
The strip flashed a safety address. It looked like a county road check out of one of the eastern states. She did not open it.
Michelle walked past the pod at 10:01, carrying a thick manila folder toward the filing cabinets. Michelle always had a folder.
Emily leaned back in her chair. "Did you seriously print the whole inbound roster again?"
"It's printed," Michelle said, not breaking stride.
"She prints everything," Emily said to Kayla.
"I got burned when the server glitched in March," Michelle called back over her shoulder. "I'm not doing that again."
At 10:04, the shop in Rawlins wanted a purchase order and would not take it any other way. Kayla walked it to the fax by the coffee machine and stood there while the machine chewed through the page at the speed of 1994. Nobody had renovated that corner. A laminated instruction card taped to the wall above it bore the old logo, green and white—VOGEL & SONS—in a typeface that had not been updated since somebody's grandfather picked it. Fourteen months since the rebrand and half the building was still Vogel. The mugs were Vogel. The lanyards were Vogel. What had been replaced was only what somebody had put a line item against.
Tim leaned against the file cabinet next to the coffee machine while she waited for the confirmation page.
"Roger's in," he said.
"On a Tuesday?"
"Board thing in the morning. He's been here since seven."
"Could be worse," Kayla said, watching the paper inch through the feeder. "He could be working the shift."
"He wouldn't know how." Tim said it without heat, which was what made it land. "I mean it. He has never once sat a board. Not in nine years. Nine years of permits and insurance and sitting across a table from the state, and he could not cover this desk for twenty minutes."
"His extension still doesn't ring through, either."
"They never migrated him to the new phones. You want him, you walk."
"Then walk."
"I'm walking." He did not walk. He looked out at the floor, which was six people and a lot of empty chairs. "Nice night. Take it while you got it."
Kayla took her confirmation page back to the pod. Emily's board sat two desks over, gray all the way down.
"Most of mine are asleep," Emily said. "I've got one guy in Ohio who won't shut his eyes till two."
"Sounds restful."
"It's boring. There's a difference." Emily had her phone out, thumbing through something before putting it face down. "My sister's got the kids again. Four nights this week. Milaca, so it's forty minutes the wrong way, and then Dave gets them at six on his way in. I have seen my children awake twice since Thursday."
"That's rough."
"It's the shift." Emily turned her chair. "Somebody said you're almost done."
"Two classes."
"Then what, you take over the company?"
"Not a chance in hell." Kayla did not look up. Tab, tab. "That degree in my hands gets me out of this hellhole."
Emily laughed, said something about the tuition benefit, and turned back to her gray screen. That was the end of it.
At 10:20, Roger came through with his coat on and a folder under his arm. "Whoever's got the Laredo turn, I want it looked at again in the morning," he said to nobody in particular, and went down the hall to the office that used to be the small conference room.
Two calls came in on top of each other at 10:31. She took them both—one on the headset and one on the desk line. She clamped the desk handset against her shoulder, typing for one driver while talking to the other, and when they were done she could not have told anybody which driver had said what.
Unit 9777 rang at 10:41.
"Lord help me," Kayla said to nobody. She took a breath and lifted her hand off the keyboard.
"Gene. I've got two minutes. Make it quick."
"This'll be quick."
"It won't."
"It might." A pause that was already too long. "Hey. Does your screen say Vogel or Northline? Mine says Vogel. On the little screen in the truck. I don't know why it says Vogel there and Northline on the paperwork, but that's above my pay grade."
He was already going. She let him.
"Anyway. I'm sitting at the Georgetown lot waiting on the pass. Four of us staged. Guy in front of me's hauling something with a 3 on it. I didn't ask."
"You're staged for Loveland."
"Where else am I gonna go? They won't let me in the tunnel with what I've got. Which is fine. I've run that pass eighty times. Ninety. I don't mind it. My knee minds it. There's about forty turns where you're on the wheel with both hands, and on a cold night I've got about one and a half hands' worth of grip, so that's the situation."
A gap opened where she could have jumped in. She didn't.
"But that's not why I called. My unit's throwing a code."
"Tractor or trailer?"
"The reefer. Since Limon. It runs twenty minutes, alarms, then runs again like nothing happened. Box temp looks fine on the panel."
She had the trailer's telemetry up in nine seconds. The data came straight off the reefer unit and it came in clean—a flat line with a little sawtooth pattern where the cooling compressor cycled on and off. It was sitting exactly at the temperature the bill of lading required, and it had been sitting there since Denver.
"Your box is fine. It's fine on my end too."
"It's the alarm I don't like."
"The alarm's the alarm. Reset it and roll. Get it in front of the shop on Thursday when you're back."
"Thursday," Gene said, doubtful—the way he was doubtful about everything he was about to do anyway. "Okay. Now the other thing. That lumper fee in Council Bluffs."
"Gene."
"I know."
"You lost the receipt."
"I did not lose the receipt. The receipt went in my shirt and the shirt went in the wash and what came out of the wash was not a receipt—it was a kind of paste. Which I'd argue is not losing it." He was enjoying himself. She was going to have to end that shortly. "Ninety-four dollars to the unloaders. Paid it out of pocket because they wouldn't take the company card. I've been carrying it since Tuesday."
Tim was at her shoulder with a hand on the back of her chair. She had not heard him come over.
"9777?"
She nodded.
"That's the Council Bluffs ninety-four. Accounting is kicking it back," Tim said. "No receipt, the system codes it to the driver."
"It doesn't code to the driver, Tim. It's ninety-four dollars and he's been out on the road for eleven days." Flat, no heat, the way you say a thing you are not asking about. "Put it on my authorization. I'll write it up."
Tim looked at the ceiling briefly, the way he did, then keyed his PIN into her override field and walked off with his hands in his pockets.
"Gene. You still there?"
"I'm here."
"You're covered."
"You don't have to do that."
"You're covered," she said again. "Reset the unit. Watch your following distance coming down. It's supposed to get ugly up there."
"That's what they keep saying." Off again. "Wind's already doing the thing where it comes across sideways and you feel it in the mirrors before you feel it in the wheel. I put my triangles out just sitting here in the lot, if you can believe that, because there's a guy backing a lowboy around like he's mad at it, and I'd rather be a nuisance than a—"
"Gene."
"Yeah."
"I've got forty trucks."
A beat. She could hear the wind on his end doing exactly what he had said it was doing.
"Go ahead," he said. "I'll call you from the other side."
She hung up.
The board was clean. Forty-one units, six of them rolling, the rest shut down or staged or sitting in a shop line in Rawlins waiting on a fax somebody would hand-carry across a parts counter in the morning. Emily had her feet up on the drawer. Brandt's screen glowed two rows over with the Sioux Falls appointment still sitting there uncorrected in his version of the record.
The strip under the left monitor flashed twice and went back to sleep.
Kayla put her hand back on the keyboard and took the next ring.
The lights went out at 11:06, and somebody in the back whooped.
It was the good kind of dark, the kind that lasts four seconds and gives everybody an excuse to stop working. Somebody clapped. Somebody else said, "There it is," in the voice of a man who had been predicting it for eleven years. Emily said, "Oh, come on," to nothing in particular.
Then the rooftop units spooled all the way down, and the room went quiet in a way it never had.
The floor came up through their feet when the generators caught. The overheads came back at half power, then full, and a small round of applause went up for the building.
Kayla was already looking at her screens. They had not come back with the lights.
Both monitors sat at the login prompt. She keyed her badge number, and the system just thought about it.
"Anybody up?" Tim called from the aisle.
"I'm at the login."
"Same."
"Give it a minute," Tim said. "The network takes longer to boot than the desktops."
She gave it a minute. She used the minute on the desk line, calling the Rawlins shop back. Unit 4877 had been third in line an hour and a half ago, and nobody had called. The kid who sounded nineteen answered on the second ring. He said they'd put Keith in a bay at 10:40 and he'd be out by two.
She wrote the update on a Post-it note because she had nowhere else to put it.
At 11:14, Brandt said, "Are you guys down?" from two rows over, which was Brandt discovering the outage by way of a delivery appointment he could not modify.
"We're all down," Kayla said.
"For how long?"
Nobody answered him.
At 11:19, the servers were still not back. Tim came down the aisle with his hands out to either side like he was steadying a wobbly table. "We're on generators," he said. "Building's on generators. That's why the lights are up. It doesn't mean the network is coming with it."
The cell tower let go somewhere around 11:20, and it did not announce itself.
Kayla's phone stopped having bars. She noticed when she picked it up to check the time and found the signal icon in the corner empty. She said nothing about it.
Two minutes later, Emily said, "Is your phone working?" and then it was a thing in the room—five people holding their phones up at various angles like it was 2004.
"There's a tower on the water plant," somebody said. "It's got a generator."
"So why doesn't it work?"
"I don't know why it doesn't work."
The desk phones still worked. Not all of them, but enough. Kayla picked up her handset out of habit, got a dial tone, and didn't think about it for another ten minutes. She was busy trying to raise a driver outside Cumberland on the desk line because his cell was garbage in that valley and always had been.
At 11:31, the fax by the coffee machine started up on its own. It printed the Rawlins confirmation she had sent at 10:04, which had apparently been trapped in some data queue for an hour and a half before finally dumping. She heard it from her desk and did not connect it to anything.
Her board was gone with everything else. The last refresh she had seen was 10:52, fourteen minutes before the lights went out, and that was the whole picture she had left.
She had a legal pad out by 11:35 and was rebuilding the board on it by hand: unit number, driver, last known location. She pulled the data from memory, from the Post-its, and from the caller ID log on the desk set.
The telemetry was gone. She did not go looking for it.
At 11:38, the dispatch system came up.
It came up the way a system comes up when it shouldn't: halfway, with the header rendering and the body of the page still white. She knew she had maybe forty seconds. She went for the contact list first. A phone directory was worth more than anything else on that machine right now, but the list refused to render.
So she opened the safety message, the one she had never opened.
Three words rendered at the top of the pane in the bold font they used for urgent subject lines:
WIDE AREA EVENT
Under them was white. The white had a shape to it—the shape of text that was supposed to arrive, four or five paragraphs of it—but it did not arrive. She scrolled to see if it was below the fold. It was not below the fold. It was not anywhere.
She backed out and got into the messaging queue with maybe twenty seconds left. She typed one macro to the fleet, all units, which was the only thing she was going to get to send:
STOP WHERE SAFE. CALL DISPATCH ON A LANDLINE. DO NOT PROCEED.
She hit send. The field grayed out. She did not find out whether it went.
Then the pane went white all the way to the top, the session dropped, and the login prompt came back. It did not think about it this time. It just sat there.
"Did anybody get in?" Tim asked.
"I got in."
"And?"
"I got in," Kayla said, and went back to her legal pad.
Michelle found a radio in the training room at 11:44. It was a plastic thing with a broken antenna and a tape deck. It ran on six D batteries that somebody had to go hunt for, and by the time they got it working, it was almost midnight.
The station they caught was out of the Twin Cities, and it was a man reading. Not a news anchor. A man with a script that had been handed to him, reading a list of counties in an order that did not mean anything, followed by a generic sentence about remaining calm, and then the counties again.
He said Stearns. He said Sherburne.
He said Mille Lacs.
Emily did not say anything at all, which was how Kayla knew she had heard it.
That was everything the man had. He had less information than the room did, because the room had drivers.
"Turn it down," Tim said. "Don't turn it off."
They turned it down and went back to work, and the man kept reading counties under everything else—the same counties, over and over.
The drivers were what came in after that. Not information. Pieces.
A guy parked outside Tulsa on the desk line, saying the interstate was stopped in both directions, he could see a hundred trailers ahead of him, and nobody was walking around. A woman in Ontario who could not get her satellite to acquire and wanted to know if it was just her truck. Somebody's owner-operator—not even one of theirs, he had just gotten the emergency number off a trailer—who said, "There's something going on with the sky out here."
"What does that mean?" Kayla asked.
"I don't know how to tell you what it means."
"Are you parked?"
"Yes."
"Then stay parked," she said, and hung up.
She wrote SKY? on the legal pad and did not come back to it.
What did not work was calling out.
Unit 4901 needed a fuel override, and the automated fuel card system was down. Kayla had to reach a truck stop in Amarillo and read a sixteen-digit number from memory to a human being because the screen she needed wouldn't open. It took her nine tries to get a ring and four more to get a person.
At 11:51, she called Northline's Denver terminal, which had four people on nights and a phone in the driver's lounge that somebody always picked up. She let it ring forty times. At 11:58, she tried the Road Rescue after-hours line on behalf of a driver in Kansas with a coolant leak and got nothing at all. Not even a hold.
She wrote the times next to the numbers on the legal pad because she did not know what else to do with them.
Emily stood up at 12:06 with her coat already on.
"My kids," she said. Her voice was flat, which was worse than shaking. "I can't stay here."
"Emily." Tim came over, his hands doing the table-steadying thing again. "Let's think about this a second. It's forty minutes to Milaca and we don't know what's out there. If we lose you between here and there, we've got a bigger problem than a board."
"I'm not asking."
"I know you're not asking. I'm asking."
Roger was in the aisle. Nobody had seen him come out of his office. He looked at Tim, not at Emily.
"You're wasting time," Roger said. "The longer she stays and you fight her, two people become useless instead of one. Let her go."
Emily was through the door in under a minute. She had known exactly where she was going before she stood up.
Kayla took Emily's four moving trucks, wrote them at the bottom of the legal pad, and went back to it.
By 12:15, the room had gotten stupid about distance.
For the third time, Kayla was shouting a unit number at Michelle, who was forty feet away at a desk she had no reason to be at. Michelle was shouting back, "Four nine what?"
Kayla stopped, picked up the legal pad, grabbed her desk handset, and carried the whole base unit with the cord trailing behind her. She walked it eight desks over and put it down next to Michelle.
The cord did not reach. That was how she found out.
She stood there for a second holding a phone that was no longer connected to the wall. She went and got a different phone, and that one did not work either.
Tim watched her do it. "The VoIP sets are all dead," he said. "Anything that routes digital through the network switch is dead. What's alive is wired analog."
"How many are wired?"
"I don't know how many are wired."
Roger came out of the hall at 12:21 with his coat off, which was the first thing anybody noticed.
"Leave it," he said. "All of you. Bring what you can carry and get over here." He planted a hand flat on the long table by the coffee machine that nobody ever used. "This table."
Nobody argued. Half of them were already drifting that way and had been for twenty minutes.
Kayla took the legal pad and her handset. The textbook stayed under her desk.
"Tim. First floor, behind the cafeteria, storage room off the receiving hall," Roger said. He was writing on the table with a marker. On the table itself. "There's a rack of the old dispatch sets in there. The heavy multi-line ones. Bring all of them. Bring the wall cords, the whole box. Take Michelle."
He pointed the marker at the rest of them. "Everybody else, I want jacks. Under every desk in this quadrant. There's a plate on the wall and there's a number on the plate. If it's got a number written in pen on masking tape, that's an old analog line, and I want to know where it is."
"How many are we looking for?" somebody asked.
"I don't know. Four. Five. There's the fax line, there's whatever's in the guard shack, and there's the fire panel. And I'm not touching the fire panel."
They found six. One of them was the fax. One was in an office that had been a supply closet in 2009 and had a live pair in the wall because nobody had ever come back to pull the wire. One was under Brandt's desk, which Brandt did not know about and had parked a filing cabinet on top of.
Tim and Michelle came back at 12:34 with a rolling cart. On it were eleven beige dispatch phones—the old brick-heavy kind with the clear plastic multi-line buttons that used to blink when someone was on hold and go steady when the line was live. They also brought a knot of cords and a stack of orange paperbacks that had been sitting on the same shelf.
"What are those?" somebody asked.
"Response guides. They're supposed to be in every terminal." Michelle put them on the end of the table. "If the system's down, that's what's left."
Kayla took a set off the cart, pushed the clip into a taped jack under the table, and put the handset to her ear.
It was there. The low, unbroken hum of an analog dial tone, power coming up out of buried copper from a central office miles away.
By 12:40, there were six people at one table with four working lines and one legal pad each.
"Alright," Roger said. "Here's the job. Our job is to park everyone. Nobody travels. I don't care what they're under, I don't care who's waiting on it, nobody moves until we understand what this is. Get them stopped somewhere with lights and people, and get the unit number and the location on paper. Push it on the macro so we're not doing it one at a time."
"The macro's been dead since eleven thirty-eight," Kayla said.
"Then—"
"It's been dead since eleven thirty-eight, Roger." Tim did not raise his voice. "If you ever took a step out of your damn office and actually looked at the screens once in a while, you'd know that."
Nobody at the table looked up.
Roger looked at him for about a second and a half.
"We'll talk after this," he said. "Let's focus."
One of the clear plastic buttons lit up steady on the fax handset at 12:46. It was unit 9777. Kayla grabbed it because it was hers.
"Gene."
"Well, there she is." He sounded fine. He sounded annoyed, which was how he sounded when nothing was wrong. "I have been sitting on the side of this road for an hour, Kayla. An hour. I called Road Rescue at quarter of eleven. The girl took the whole thing, unit number, mile marker, the whole deal, said somebody's coming. Nobody's coming. Now I call back and I get nothing. Not a hold. Nothing."
"What's the situation?"
"The situation is I came down off the top and I had a brake hang up on me on the second switchback. By the time I got the rig stopped, I'd cooked two tires off the curb side. Rear axle. They're gone. They're just gone. There's steel cord all over the road up there. And the brakes are locked solid on that axle now, so this trailer's not going anywhere even if I had rubber, which I don't."
A gust of wind hit his truck, roaring through the phone speaker.
"So I'm sitting," he continued. "I got my triangles out. I'm out of hours in about two hours anyway, so honestly it's not the worst place to be stuck if it wasn't for—"
"Gene, is anybody else up there?"
"Nobody's come by in twenty minutes. That's not normal for a Tuesday, is it?"
"No."
"Everything alright down there?"
"Tell me about the trailer."
"There's nothing to tell about the trailer—it's just sitting there. The reefer unit crapped out on me somewhere in the middle of all that. Which, you know, I called you about that alarm and you said Thursday. I'm not saying it like that. I'm just saying."
He was rambling. She let him.
"The only thing is, I went back to look at the tires, see how bad it was, and I'm telling you I couldn't get near the tandems. Standing three, four foot off and I could feel it on my face. In this wind. That's how hot that wheel end is."
Kayla did not say anything.
"Kayla?"
"I'm here."
"Anyway. If you can find out where my tow truck is, I'd appreciate it. Rescue truck, I mean. Not my truck. My truck's right here." He laughed at that, alone in the cab.
"Stay in the cab," she said. "I'll call you back on this number."
"You're gonna call me back?"
"I'm going to call you back."
She hung up and sat with her hand on the heavy beige receiver.
"Michelle. Have you got paper on 9777?"
"I've got the week's roster. It's in my desk. I print them." Michelle said it like a confession.
"Go get it."
Roger looked up from the other end of the table. "Nine," he said. "Nine's the specialized fleet."
"Yeah."
"Where is he?"
"US-6. Coming down off Loveland Pass. He's been parked an hour with a hot wheel end, and his reefer's dead."
Roger did not move for a second.
"Michelle," he said. "Go."
Roger reached down the table and pulled one of the orange paperbacks toward him.
It took four minutes.
The manifest was two pages, and Michelle read the relevant line off the top of the second one.
"UN 3119. Organic peroxide type F, liquid, temperature controlled." She looked up. "It's got a control temperature on it."
"Book," Roger said.
She had the orange paperback open on the table with her hand flat on the page to hold it. The stamp inside the front cover was green and white.
"Guide one forty-eight." She found the section. "Heat sensitive. Above the control temperature, the material decomposes. Decomposition generates heat. The heat accelerates the decomposition."
She stopped and read the next part to herself first, which Kayla noticed.
"It says, 'May explode from heat or contamination.' Then it gives isolation numbers. There's one for a spill, and a different one if it's involved in a fire."
"What's the fire one."
Michelle put her finger on the line and read it twice before she said it.
"Half a mile. In all directions."
Kayla was looking at her legal pad. "He's sitting fifty feet from it."
Nobody at the table said anything for a second, and underneath the silence, the man on the radio was still reading counties.
"It's not a bomb," Michelle said. "It's not on a timer. It just gets hotter."
"How long do we have?"
"The book doesn't give a timer. It gives a temperature, and his cooling unit is dead."
"There's an emergency number on the shipping paper," Michelle said. "There's always one. Twenty-four hours."
"Dial it."
She dialed it off the manifest, and everybody at the table listened to a phone ring in a building somewhere. Roger let it go longer than he needed to.
"It's supposed to be answered in thirty seconds," Michelle said.
Roger took the handset and set it back in the cradle himself.
"The book says not to move it," Michelle said, not looking up. "Cargo or vehicle. If it's taken heat, you leave it and you isolate."
"The book assumes somebody's coming." Roger picked the marker back up. "Fire crew, hazmat crew, a trooper with a flare kit. Every line in that book is written for a world where somebody's coming."
Kayla looked at the page of times on her legal pad where nobody had picked up.
"Then that's the list," Roger said. "We're not getting a crew up there and we're not getting that box down. Write the load off. He unhooks, he bobtails out, and he gets distance. He does not dump the suspension, he does not open the doors, he does not touch the load. Leave the box, take the man."
Kayla was doing the arithmetic, and she did it out loud without realizing it. "Gloves. Gear, pin, lines. On that landing gear in that wind, with his hands." She was looking at the legal pad and not at anybody. "That's fifteen minutes. He's standing right next to it for fifteen minutes."
"I know what it is."
"Then why isn't he walking."
"Because there's nothing up that road and nobody coming, and it's October at twelve thousand feet," Roger said. "The truck has heat and the truck moves."
"And if there isn't fifteen minutes."
Roger put the marker down and picked it back up.
"There's a jack in my office," he said. "It's an old pair, doesn't route through the switch. Take it. I need this table."
He did not go with her. He was already turning to Michelle about a unit in Ohio.
Kayla took the legal pad and went down the hall.
The fax by the coffee machine was running when she went past it. Judging by the tray, it had been running a while. There was nobody standing at it. She did not stop.
The hall was dark because the overheads were on whatever the generators would give them. Roger's office still had a rectangle of unfaded paint on the wall where the small conference room sign used to be. The phone on the desk was beige and had a cord. The clock on the wall said 1:04, which was 12:04 where Gene was, and she did the conversion without meaning to, the way she had done it four hundred times.
She closed the door.
She dialed. It went to nothing—not a busy signal, just dead air. She hung up, dialed it again, and it rang twice.
"Yeah."
"Gene."
"That was fast. You get somebody rolling?"
"No." She had a pen in her hand and she was not writing anything. "Listen to me. I need you to drop that trailer and bobtail down to Silverthorne. Right now. Tonight."
"Kayla—"
"That trailer's out of service. Two tires off one axle and locked brakes on the same side. It doesn't move tonight and it doesn't move tomorrow morning. It moves when somebody gets a lowboy under it, and nobody's getting a lowboy up that road in this."
A pause with the wind in it.
"I'll wait on Rescue. They took the whole thing, unit number, mile marker. Somebody always comes."
"Nobody's coming." She kept her voice where it was. "Everything's down. Not us. Everything. Systems out across the country. I've got a page of numbers here where nobody answered and a man in Tulsa telling me the interstate's stopped in both directions with nobody walking around."
"Okay," he said slowly. "Okay. Then why am I in a hurry."
Here it was.
"Because of what's in the box," Kayla said. "Your unit's been dead since the brakes went and you've got a wheel end you can't stand next to—and there is nobody left who can tell us what the inside of that trailer is doing."
The wind went across his end of the line and came back.
"Yeah," Gene said. "Yeah. I know what's in there, Kayla. I watched them load it in Denver." He let out a breath. "I've been sitting here an hour telling myself the cold's doing me a favor."
"It might be. Nobody knows."
"Half mile?"
"Half mile if it's in a fire. That's the number in the book."
"And I'm fifty foot."
"You're fifty foot."
He did not say anything for a moment, and she let him have the silence.
"Then I'll get up the road," he said. "Half a mile up, sit down out of the wind, wait for daylight. Ten minutes and I'm not standing under it."
"What have you got on you."
"Carhartt. Hood. The work gloves."
"Out of the wind where."
He was quiet.
"There's no out of the wind," he said. "I came down through that. It's cut rock on the one side and it's air on the other. There's no ditch to get in and there's no trees till you're way down." A gust took him and came back. "And then what. Then I'm a guy standing on Loveland in October and nobody's come by in an hour."
"The truck has heat," Kayla said. "And the truck moves."
"Yeah."
"So you're under that trailer. Fifteen minutes. Gear, pin, lines."
"With it doing whatever it's doing."
"Yes."
"Okay." He took a long breath. "Okay, Kayla. Have I got fifteen minutes?"
She looked at the rectangle of unfaded paint on the wall where the conference room sign had been.
"Gloves on," she said. "Drop your gear, pull the pin, stow your lines. Do it in that order and don't skip the lines. I don't want you tearing a gladhand off and stranding a tractor too."
"Right."
"Then you get in and you go down and you park at the truck stop where there's lights and people."
"Right." He was moving now. "Alright. Fifteen and I'm rolling."
The generator hum came up through the floor of Roger's office and went back down.
"You're covered," Kayla said.
"Well. Okay then."
"Leave your triangles up."
"Say again?"
"Your triangles. They're already out behind it and I want them out. It's a live shoulder and I'm not having somebody come around that corner in the dark and put a car into a placarded box." She kept her voice exactly where it had been. "Don't go back for them. They're the trailer's now, not yours. Somebody'll pick them up when they get the box."
"That's three triangles, Kayla. That's ninety seconds."
"They're not yours anymore."
"I've had those triangles eleven years."
"Leave them."
A pause.
"Okay."
"Say it back to me."
"Gloves, gear, pin, lines. Leave the triangles. Bobtail down to Silverthorne." He said it the way he said everything, like a man reading a list back to a waitress. "Call you when I'm rolling."
"Call me when you're rolling."
"Kayla."
"What."
"You sound tired."
"I'm tired," she said. "Just go, Gene."
"Going."
The sound changed. Fabric, then the flat clatter of a phone set down on something hard, and then the two-tone chime a truck makes when the door is open and the key is still in it. He did not shut the door. The wind came in on top of the chime, and the two of them ran together and stayed that way.
She heard him get down.
Then the gear. She could hear it through all of it because it was metal and it had a rhythm—a handle going around and catching at the same place every time. She sat in Roger's chair with the pad on her knee and the pen in her hand, and listened to a man crank a landing gear down on the side of a mountain in Colorado.
It went fast at first. Then it slowed and got heavier, and the rhythm went long—the low range taking the weight.
That part went for a long time. Longer than she thought it would.
Then a flat clack, once. The pin.
Then nothing.
She waited for the lines.
The chime kept going.
"Gene?" she said.