He pulled out a can of sweetened condensed milk. Still clutching the gun, he stretched over the counter, and rolled it across the floor. “For the baby.”

We couldn’t drive the speed limit. Asphalt, gravel—it made no difference. The roads could not be saved. They had turned white, a crumbling, chemical white, as if they had had a shock. The last stab at ice control, at melting the winter that would not be melted, had stained them.

It got over everything, salt and whatever it was: the brine on the roads. I had streaks of it on my coveralls. It sharpened the ends of my hair. When I touched my face I tasted it. The truck was encased like a salt-bake. Starla looked like a beach baby, her hair knotted, her clothes hemmed with grit, as if she had rolled in it. Salt got into all our food, bitter on our tongues.

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.