Five miles later, he saw the lights.
Not many. Maybe a dozen, scattered across what looked like a valley between two ridges. Most of them were dim, the yellow glow of old incandescent bulbs behind dirty windows.
He slowed as he entered the town.
Copper City.
The name was optimistic. There was no city here. There never had been. Just a mining camp that had grown large enough to pretend and then shrunk back down to the truth.
The main street was two lanes of snow filled with tire tracks. Most of the buildings looked like they'd been abandoned in stages. Some were boarded up, plywood nailed over windows and doors. Others were just empty, their glass broken, their interiors open to the weather.
Snow had drifted into doorways and piled against walls. Roofs sagged under the weight of decades.
He passed what had been a hotel once. Three stories, brick, with a false front that made it look taller. The windows on the upper floors were dark and broken. The ground floor had been a bar, maybe, or a general store.
A church stood on a corner, white clapboard with a small steeple. The cross on top was crooked.
Rusted equipment sat in vacant lots between buildings. An ore cart on rails that went nowhere. A massive iron gear, six feet across, half-buried in snow. A truck from the 1940s, its tires long gone, its bed filled with ice.
And above it all, visible against the sky, were the headframes.
Two of them, maybe three. Skeletal towers of steel and wood rising from the hills above town, their shapes stark and angular. Mine shafts. The reason this place had existed at all. They looked like gallows.
Joe drove slowly down the main street, taking it in.
There were a few signs of life. A house with smoke coming from the chimney. A pickup truck parked in a driveway, snow piled on its hood but not buried. A light in a window.
But mostly, it was dead.
Literally frozen in time.
At the far end of the street, almost like a strange mirage, he saw the convenience store.
It was the brightest thing in town. Fluorescent lights blazed behind plate glass windows, harsh and clinical against the darkness. The building itself was small, single-story, flat-roofed. Concrete block painted white. Hand-lettered signs in the windows advertised cigarettes, beer, lottery tickets. A Coca-Cola logo from the 1970s hung above the door, faded and rusted.
A single gas pump stood out front, old enough that it still had analog dials. It didn't look operational.
Joe pulled the truck into the gravel lot and parked. He sat there for a moment, engine running, letting his breathing settle.
The pay phone was mounted on the outside wall of the store, next to the door. Old rotary style, enclosed in a metal housing that had been painted blue once. The paint was mostly gone now, worn away by weather and time. The phone itself looked intact, though. The handset hung in its cradle. The coin slot gleamed dully under the fluorescent light.
Joe hoped it was still working. He shut off the engine and climbed out.
The cold hit him immediately and the snow crunched under his boots.
He walked to the store's entrance, pushed the door open and a bell jingled.
The interior was exactly what he'd expected. Narrow aisles lined with wire shelving. Linoleum floor, cracked and yellowed. The smell of old coffee and cleaning solution and something vaguely sweet—air freshener, maybe, or spilled soda that had never been properly cleaned up.
The shelves held the basics. Canned goods. Bread. Milk in a small cooler that rattled loudly. Motor oil. Antifreeze. Cigarettes behind the counter in a locked case. A rotating rack of chips near the register.
Behind the counter sat a woman in her seventies.
She looked up when he entered. She wore a heavy cardigan over a flannel shirt, and her gray hair hung down to her shoulders.
Joe nodded to her.
She nodded back.
