The truck wouldn't start. That was the first bad thing. The second bad thing was that it was twenty below zero and the heater had quit three hours ago. The third bad thing was that Sarah wasn't going to help.

She was in the passenger seat, wrapped in a blanket that used to be red and was now the color of dried blood, staring out the window at nothing. She'd been staring out windows a lot lately. Not at things. At nothing. Like the nothing was more interesting than anything there was to see.

"Can you check the gas?" I asked.

She didn't answer.

I checked the gas. We were half full. Which was better than half empty, I told myself, which is what you tell yourself when you're driving a dying truck through the middle of nowhere with your daughter who doesn't speak to you and a radio that plays nothing but static and news about people who aren't you.

The news said the government was moving people. North. Somewhere north. They didn't say where north was exactly. Just north. Like north was a place you could get to if you just kept driving.

I kept driving.

Doc's gas station appeared out of the snow like a mirage. A small building with a neon sign that read GAS in letters that had lost half their bulbs. A garage with one bay. A house attached to the back where Doc lived, or whatever he lived on.

I pulled in. The truck coughed and died for real this time.

Doc was standing outside, hands in his pockets, watching the snow fall. He was a big man with a face that had been weathered by too many suns and too many winters. He didn't say anything when I got out. He just nodded, the way men nod when they've seen each other enough times that words are unnecessary.

"Won't start," I said.

"I see that."

"Think it's the carburetor."

"Could be." He looked at the truck, then at me, then at the sky. "Temperature's dropping. You should find shelter."

"I will."

We stood there in the snow. Sarah was visible through the frosted window, a shape in the passenger seat. She hadn't moved in hours.

"Your daughter," Doc said. "She okay?"

"She's fine."

"She's quiet."

"That's her thing."

Doc nodded. He looked past me, at the road stretching north into the white. "They're saying things on the radio. Bad things."

"What kind of things?"

He shrugged. "Things about the Sun. Things about moving. Things about not moving. Nobody knows what they're talking about."

I lit a cigarette. The wind took the flame immediately. I tried again. It worked.

Inside the station, Doc made coffee. It was the best coffee I'd ever had, mostly because it was hot and the world was cold. We drank it in mugs that had seen better decades. Sarah came in eventually, shook the snow off her coat, and sat at the small table in the corner. She didn't look at me. She looked at the wall.

"Radio says there's food in the northern towns," she said. Her voice was flat, the way it had been for months.

"Radio says a lot of things."

"Radio says the migration is mandatory."

"Radio also says a lot of things about celebrities."

She didn't smile. I didn't blame her. Smiling took energy, and energy was something we didn't have much of.

Doc came back from the garage with news that wasn't good. "Carburetor's shot. I can fix it, but I need parts. Don't have 'em."

"How long?"

"Two days. Maybe three."

Three days. In three days, the temperature could drop another twenty degrees. In three days, the food could run out. In three days, anything could happen.

"Can we walk?" I asked.

Doc looked at me like I'd asked if we could fly. "To where?"

"Anywhere. Not here."

He was right. There was nowhere to go. The road went north, and the north was cold and empty and full of people who were also trying to go somewhere. The road went south, and the south was where we'd come from, and there was nothing back there worth seeing.

But staying wasn't an option either.

I slept in the truck that night. Doc let me use his garage bay, which was better than nothing. The temperature dropped to thirty below. The truck's engine block cracked, I could hear it, a small sound like a bone breaking. I lay in the seat, wrapped in everything I owned, and listened to the truck die.

Sarah came in around midnight. She brought the blanket and a bottle of something that wasn't coffee. We drank it in silence. She sat on the edge of the seat and looked at me for the first time in weeks.

"Dad," she said.

"Yeah."

"Can we go to Mom?"

I didn't know where Linda was. She'd left three years ago, said she needed space, said she couldn't do this anymore, said a lot of things that sounded important at the time and meant nothing now. She'd given me an address in Ohio, but I'd never written. I told myself it was because I was busy. It was because I didn't know what to say.

"I don't know where she is," I said.

Sarah nodded. She didn't cry. People my daughter's age don't cry anymore. They just stop talking and stare at walls and drink things they shouldn't.

We left the next morning. Doc gave us some canned beans and a jug of gas. I hot-wired the truck using methods I'd learned from a man in Tulsa who owed me a favor. The engine turned over once, twice, three times, and then caught with a sound like a dying animal.

We drove north.

The road was worse than I expected. Snow had turned to ice, and the ice had turned to something that was neither snow nor ice but something in between, a hard, glassy surface that made the truck slide and skid and threaten to flip at every turn. I drove slow. Slow was safe. Slow kept us alive.

By afternoon, we hit traffic. Not real traffic, just people. Cars and trucks and in some cases wagons pulled by horses, all moving north at various speeds, some moving at all. They clogged the road like a clot in a vein, and we inched forward like blood trying to get through a blocked artery.

I stopped the truck and got out. The air was so cold it burned my lungs. I walked forward, through the line of vehicles, past faces that looked exactly like mine: tired, cold, afraid but not showing it.

A man in a pickup truck leaned out his window. "How far you think we got?" he asked.

"Where?"

"North."

I looked north. The road disappeared into the snow, and beyond the snow there was nothing but sky. "I don't know," I said.

"Radio says there's a town fifty miles north. Says they got heat."

"Radio says a lot of things."

He nodded, understanding. He'd heard the same thing from someone else, somewhere else, at some other gas station. The news traveled faster than the people.

We drove until dark. The truck's headlights carved a narrow tunnel through the snow, and everything outside that tunnel was black. I drove with one hand on the wheel and the other holding a thermos of coffee that had gone cold an hour ago.

Sarah was asleep. Or pretending to be. Hard to tell the difference these days.

I thought about Tom. My brother. He'd been a good man. He'd died doing something important, or something stupid, or something that was both. The company that employed him sent a letter and a watch that stopped at 3:47. I kept the watch in my pocket. Sometimes I took it out and looked at it. 3:47. Whatever was happening at 3:47, I'd never know.

That's the thing about life. Most of it happens at times you'll never see.

The truck died again at 2 AM. This time it was the fuel line. Frozen solid. I couldn't fix it. I sat in the dark truck and listened to the wind howl outside and thought about nothing in particular.

In the morning, Sarah was gone.

Not run away gone. Gone gone. She'd taken the blanket and the beans and the rest of the gas. The truck seat was cold where she'd been sitting. On the seat was a note in her handwriting:

Dad, I'm going south. Maybe I'll find Mom. Maybe I won't. Either way, it's something. Don't look for me.

I read the note three times. Then I put it in my pocket next to the watch. 3:47. Somewhere, at 3:47, my daughter was either finding her mother or freezing on the side of a road.

I got out of the truck. The sky was gray, the snow was gray, the world was gray. I walked north because that's what you do when you don't know which way to go. You pick a direction and you walk.

The road was empty now. Sarah had taken a different route, or the road had cleared, or both. I walked for hours. The cold was less painful now. My body had adapted, the way it adapts to everything: starvation, loss, the slow erosion of hope.

I found a building around noon. An old farmhouse, half-buried in snow, its windows broken, its door hanging open. I went inside. The floor was covered in snow that had blown in through the roof. I cleared a space and sat down.

I took out the watch. 3:47. I put it back in my pocket.

I slept. When I woke up, it was dark. I slept again. When I woke up, it was light. The snow had stopped falling. The sky was clear and gray and endless.

I got up. I walked.

That's all there is. Walk. Find shelter. Eat beans. Drive when you can. Sleep when you can. Don't think about the Sun. Don't think about the migration. Don't think about Sarah or Linda or Tom or 3:47.

Just walk.

The road went on. The sky went on. The nothing went on.

And I walked.