Gone

He yanked free. “Don’t follow me.”

Then he stepped into the night.

For one breath, Ruth saw him clearly beneath the bar’s yellow light: one glove, no coat, shoulders hunched against the wind. He headed west along the street, toward the low houses and dark lots beyond the last row of businesses.

Ruth swore and grabbed her parka from the hook.

The bartender called after her. “He does this all the time.”

“That’s what worries me.”

Outside, the cold struck through her clothes before she had pulled the hood tight. The wind came hard off the water, flattening the snow against the buildings and lifting it again in twisting sheets. Nome’s streetlights made pale cones that ended a few yards from the curb. Beyond them, the town dissolved into moving white.

Dan was already halfway to the next light.

“Dan!”

He did not turn.

Ruth ran after him, boots punching through crusted snow. Her eyes watered instantly. She lowered her head and followed the dark shape of his back as it moved between the lights.

The street was familiar by day. At night, in a gale, it became a corridor with no walls. Snow hissed along the boards of the buildings. A metal sign clanged somewhere overhead, striking the same note again and again. Ruth could hear her own breathing and the hard scrape of Dan’s boots ahead.

“Stop!” she shouted.

This time he turned.

The wind tore at him. His bare hand was pressed against his side, and his expression had changed. The anger was still there, but beneath it was something less steady.

“Go back,” he called.

“Your house is the other way.”

“I know where I live.”

“Then let me walk you there.”

A gust drove snow between them. Dan bent into it and kept going.

Ruth pushed forward. She had escorted drunk men home before, men who laughed, cursed, or promised they could walk better than anyone alive. Dan had a reputation for getting into fights after drinking, and usually the ending was ordinary: a bruised knuckle, a night on a friend’s couch, an apology that lasted until the next weekend.

But the cold did not care what was ordinary.

She reached the next streetlight and found only a smear of footprints. The wind had already begun filling them. Dan’s tracks led toward the edge of the light, then blurred into the snow.

“Dan!”

No answer.

Ruth turned slowly, searching the road behind her. The bar was a yellow square in the distance. The door opened, and the bartender stood in it, a dark figure framed by warmth.

“Did you see where he went?” Ruth shouted.

The bartender cupped a hand to his mouth. “West!”

“I know that!”

The door shut.

Ruth moved on. Her gloves creaked when she flexed her fingers. The cold had found the seam at her wrist and was working inward. Ahead, a row of houses hunched against the storm. Behind them lay open ground, wind-scoured and uneven, with no fence high enough to stop a person from wandering into it.

Dan should have been visible. He was broad, dark-haired, and wearing a gray sweatshirt that ought to have stood out against the snow.

There was nothing.

Ruth stopped beneath the light. Snow struck her face like thrown sand.

She listened.

At first there was only the wind. Then, faintly, came a hollow thump from somewhere beyond the houses. It might have been a door. It might have been a loose sheet of plywood. It might have been Dan falling.

Ruth left the road.

The snow reached above her boots at once. She stumbled, caught herself against a fence, and felt the rough wood bite through her glove. Beyond the fence, the ground fell away toward a drainage ditch choked with drifted snow.

“Dan?” she called.

Her voice vanished almost as soon as it left her.

She climbed over the fence and swept her flashlight across the ditch. The beam caught weeds, ice, and a torn strip of plastic snapping from a post. No body. No movement.

The wind erased the ground as she watched. Tracks appeared for a second beneath the beam, shallow depressions leading from the street toward the ditch, then softened under blowing snow.

Ruth backed toward the road.

She had to make a choice. Go back for help, or keep searching alone and risk losing the last sign of him. Dan had no coat. His hands would be numb by now. If he had fallen, the storm could cover him before anyone arrived.

She turned toward the town and ran.

The bar door opened before she reached it. Warm air rolled over her face, thick with spilled beer, smoke, and the sharp odor of wet wool.

“He’s gone,” Ruth said.

The bartender stared at her. “What do you mean, gone?”

“Call for a vehicle. Get flashlights. Blankets. Anyone sober enough to search.”

The man from the fight had stopped holding his cheek. Blood marked his fingers. “He walked west.”

“You saw him leave?”

“I saw him walk out.”

“Did you follow?”

“No.”

“Did you touch him after the fight?”

His eyes hardened. “You think I killed him?”

“I think I’m asking questions.”

The bartender lifted the phone. “Nobody killed anybody.”

“Then help me find him.”

The call went out. Within minutes, people began appearing from the back rooms and neighboring businesses, pulling on coats, boots, hats. Their voices lowered as they gathered near the door.

Ruth stood beneath the bar’s weak heater, trying to warm her hands. She watched Dan’s blood drip from the cuff of her glove where his sleeve had brushed her. It looked almost black against the fabric.

The man from the fight came closer. “He said something.”

Ruth looked up. “What?”

“Before he left.”

“What did he say?”

The man glanced toward the windows. Snow raced past the glass. “He asked if the door was still there.”

Ruth waited.

“What door?”

“I don’t know.”

“You were standing beside him.”

“I thought he was drunk.”

“You thought correctly.”

The bartender set down the phone. “Search team’s coming from the station.”

“Good.”

A woman in a red parka pushed through the gathering crowd. “This isn’t the first time.”

No one answered her.

She looked at Ruth. “People disappear out here.”

“People get lost,” the bartender said.

“Not all of them.”

Ruth knew the stories. Nome carried them the way snow carried scraps of paper from one street to another. A prospector who vanished between two cabins and left his lantern burning. A fisherman whose sled was found intact while he was never found. A young man who walked out after an argument and disappeared before reaching the next block. Some had been taken by the sea, some by drunkenness, some by the cold. Others left behind too little to decide anything at all.

The stories changed depending on who told them. In one version, the missing had followed voices across the tundra. In another, they had stepped through places that were not there in daylight. Most people laughed at that part until the wind rose.

The woman in the red parka leaned closer. “This storm has a way of hiding what it takes.”

Ruth pulled her hood up again. “Storms don’t take people.”

The woman’s gaze shifted toward the dark window. “That’s what they say afterward.”

Outside, engines started one after another. Headlights smeared across the snow. Searchers moved into the street, their voices swallowed by the gale.

Ruth led them west.

They found Dan’s footprints only in fragments. At one corner, the tracks crossed a patch of packed snow and then vanished beneath a fresh drift. Near the ditch, a boot mark angled sharply toward the open ground. Someone found a cigarette crushed into the snow. Someone else found nothing at all.

“Dan!” Ruth shouted until her throat burned.

The storm gave back pieces of sound: her own name, perhaps, or a word carried from another searcher. She turned each time, expecting to see him standing under the next streetlight.

The hours narrowed around them. The town lights blurred. Snow gathered on Ruth’s shoulders and froze along the edge of her hood.

A searcher called from beyond the last lamp.

“Ruth!”

She ran toward the voice.

He stood beside a low rise where the street ended and the open ground began. His flashlight pointed downward. In the beam lay a single black glove, half buried in snow.

Ruth knew it before she touched it.

Dan’s glove was stiff with ice. The fingers were curled as if they had closed around something. She lifted it, and a small crust of frozen snow broke from the cuff.

“Any tracks?” she asked.

The searcher shook his head.

Ruth swept her light across the ground. The snow beyond the glove was smooth and unmarked, rolling away into darkness. No footprints. No drag marks. No broken crust. Nothing leading toward the ditch, the houses, or the sea.

Behind her, someone whispered, “Maybe he went farther.”

Ruth stared at the glove in her hand.

The wind pressed against her back, hard enough to make her lean forward. For an instant, beneath the roar, she thought she heard a door close somewhere out on the empty ground.

She turned toward the sound.

There was only snow.

Ruth closed her fingers around Dan’s glove and looked at the blank stretch beyond the streetlights. They had found what they came for, a sign that Dan had been there.

But the sign stopped where the world began to disappear.

End of chapter one. 32 more chapters in the full book.