There were shacks in the distance, up on the hills, black and silent. I could not see the squint of any sunlight off their windows. Maybe their windows had no glass. I saw no smoke from a stove or cook fire. Nobody came by on the road.

“Let’s back up and take that turn,” I said.

“Off the highway?” Grayson asked. “You’re sure?”

“I am worried about the ice on that road,” I admitted.

“I’ve driven down worse, plenty of times,” Dance said.

“Ice beats pirates,” Grayson said.

We took the right turn.

I let Dance stay at the wheel. I sat up in the seat behind him, leaning forward, looking around. Grayson mumbled something about food or coffee, but I hoped the right turn, our shortcut, would be too quick to even think about stopping. And where would we stop? We were nowhere.

Morning meant nothing. The sun was out: weak and watery. It only made the landscape seem colder somehow, more brittle. It hurt to stare at it. The fields full of poverty grass looked sharp enough to crack. No wind waved them. I hadn’t seen any animals.

The road dipped and swerved. Each turn unveiled a secret of the road: ice slicing down the middle like a ribbon of fat. Or a chunk of snow, stained red. Or a child’s shoe, lost in a snowdrift. The brakes gritted on the ice and Dance swore.

We passed a stretch of land that had once been orchards. Ice encased the trees, shimmery as jellyfish. Row after row of them, shriveled and glinting. This sun wasn’t going to melt anything. There were large wooden crates at the edge of the orchard. They had been split, kicked, or splintered open by hungry people, thieves. There was nothing inside.

Pig houses, sullen as coffins, replaced the orchards. I didn’t see any pigs. Maybe it was too cold for them. Then something came into view in the distance. Gray and raised: a road, or runway.

Dance saw it, too. “Is that an airport?”

There were people on it, moving too fast to be walking.

“What the hell?” Grayson said.

The way they glided in and out of view... They were skateboarding.

“A skate park?” Grayson said. “Here?”

“Let’s turn around,” I said.

“How?”

It was already too late. The road was ending.

Our right turn was a dead end.

There was no way to back up, no space wide enough for the trailer to turn. The road had turned to gravel. The sides of it fell away, crumbling, and the hills rose up, steep and spiky with dead grass. There were structures up on those hills. Houses. The road was ending in somebody’s land.

It ran right under a gate, which was thrown open. The right turn wasn’t a road at all, I realized.

It was a driveway.