As the train rattled through Nebraska like electric horses on a track of copper, it was clocking a brisk forty miles per hour. What was fast for any other railroad was routine for this company. They had invested in only the finest steel forged in Pittsburgh for their tracks. Usually, temperature swings played games with steel, and so most tracks heaved like mercury in the lungs of the thermometer throughout the year, fracturing in the winter and buckling in the summer. But businessmen as far away as Chicago advertised their tracks as being as strong and weighted down like a dropped anchor. Rails as straight as the mayor’s teeth, all of the posters said. With the bipolar seasons offered up by the prairies railroad tracks could never be too consistent.
Over five hundred miles to the northwest, a different machine was assembling itself in the beautiful barrens of Montana. But where the steel tracks were born in the womb of a boiling forge – one that was over 2,000 °F – this machine was rising out of a cold forge, one that was below freezing, sub-zero actually. There was a stubborn patch of cold front that had floated down like a bubble from the Arctic the week before and became lodged in Nebraska like a splinter. At the same time, there was a punch of warm air that was snaking its way through the deep wrinkles of the Rockies. As the warm front ramped over the mountains, it sliced through the cold air, managing to dislodge it in the process. The warm air was a wet blanket, holding enough moisture to drown cities. And when that warm air mixed with the cold, it formed snowflakes by the infinity, until the clouds looked like a field of dandelions. Every snowflake was a watchmaker’s imagination, made up of dozens, even hundreds, of tiny ice crystals that hugged each other like gears.
Most clouds are puffs of smoke, like words spoken in the cold night. But this storm chose to be different. The skies turned a dangerous shade of white, as if the world was disappearing into a shark’s smile. And as white as the storm was, the thick clouds blocked out the sunlight, leaving the land scorched like gunpowder until you could smell the sulfur. And nature moved the storm across the earth like a stick of rubber, erasing the ink down to the bone of the white paper.
A few miles southeast of the storm’s teeth, there was a ranch with dozens of head of cattle. They grazed in a lonely pasture, surrounded on all sides by warty hills. They ate quietly, unaware that they had been orphaned just that morning – their rancher laid dead in his kitchen, a broken cup with cold coffee dripping off the jigsaw ceramic.
As the cattle ate their fill of grass, a snowflake drifted between them. The flake was so fragile that even the tiny wind from the swish of the cattle’s tails tossed it around. As the snowflake kissed the ground, it melted away like a seed planting itself into the soil. Two hours later, all of the cattle were dead in the field, buried by over a foot of snow that the winds had shoveled over the carcasses.
The dragon of snow roared down to Nebraska on its wings of wind, leaving behind it a trail of bleach, snow that burned the eyes and dissolved the lungs with every breath. And still, to the east, the train continued to chug towards Wyoming, those onboard unaware that the tracks were leading them straight to the gates of hell frozen over.