Where towns had stopped plowing, other trucks and cars would stamp down the snow, making a wild trail, dangerous as glass. And some of the rural roads had seen no travelers for days. We crept through them, an icebreaker making our way. When we stopped, we had to knock the snow in chunks from the undercarriage of the truck and trailer.

Once we saw a stopped station wagon. At the last moment, right before we passed the car, a woman with long brown hair stepped out from behind the front bumper, her arms raised and open as if expecting a package.

Dance swerved to avoid hitting her. We didn’t slow. We didn’t go back to see what she wanted. We didn’t talk about it, as we didn’t talk about the man in the Taco Bell.

I thought the woman may have wanted what the man with the sheepskin and skeleton tattoo had wanted: to die, to take us along. To not be alone in death. I remembered hearing that freezing to death was like burning. You felt warm; you wanted to throw off your clothes. You wanted to bury yourself in the snow. You suddenly felt good in the cold—and that was a very bad sign.

We saw hitchhikers, mostly men with the beards and tattered clothes that showed they had been on the road for some time, packs bulging from their shoulders. They leaned against guardrails. The duct tape patching their coats shone. Their boots were split. Their faces began to blur, and I stopped even noticing whether or not they held out a thumb.

“We ain’t stopping for no man,” Jamey said.

Nobody argued with her.

The first time we saw a town on fire, it was around sunset. The horizon was a smeared pink line, and above the pink rested darkness. A gray cloud, which just sat there like a front, widening as we came closer. I waited for the scattershot of snow or sleet as we drove on through.

But it wasn’t snow that waited in that sky. It was a great cloud of smoke, as wide as a storm. The town ahead was burning.

I could see smoke poured from the highest windows: a church. Flames bloomed below a steeple, which would surely fall. The smoke traveled diagonally up from the fires—five, seven, maybe more structures burning in the town: gray above and red below. Why were such terrible things so beautiful? The fires made color in our winter world.

Dance hit the recirculate button on the dashboard, which didn’t even work, and Grayson, who was driving, made a turn off the road, avoiding the town. The others pressed their faces against the windows and craned their necks to see the fires, but I didn’t.