The snow-covered prairies glittered under the sparkling night skies. Sachs had her hands wrapped around Koz’s waist as he leaned forward and kicked up the speed of Ethel’s four-stroke Yamaha snowmobile. She looked back at Captain Li, further behind on the trial, trying to keep up in Rusty the waitress’s two-stroke Thundercat. “This sucker can go 110 mph and stay there all day long,” Ethel had promised them back at the truck stop, and Koz was determined to max the 145 horsepower to reach the Safeguard complex inside of 20 minutes. Sachs felt herself slipping and tightened her grip on Koz, but her hands were too numb to feel. Her face was a frozen mask in the wind. But she could feel her heart pounding out of her chest. The stillness before the coming nuclear storm was ghostly, and she and Koz were just vapors in the night. “The land that time forgot,” Koz told her, and she was surprised how clearly she could hear him. “That’s one of the reasons the Safeguard complex closed down.
