Excerpt: Ultima Thule: the farthest north you'll ever go

“We don’t totally understand how this happened yet. But the sheriff just got here. And he’s going to help us figure that out. I promise you we are going to get to the bottom of this and give you all the answers you want.” Eileen nodded kind of absentmindedly then looked Christopher in the eye. “Albert here is going to take you into town. You’ll have something to eat and get some sleep. We’ll be working here to find out what happened to Jim.” Eileen started to cry and Albert took her elbow and guided her up out of the chair. The two of them headed for a door and Christopher came back through the hallway the way they had come in. Christopher picked up his walkie-talkie again.
“South garage door one this is Christopher Donaldson. Are you there?” He waited for the reply with the walkie up by his head. But he didn’t slow his pace through the hallways. The crowd was thinning out now. People had mostly left the facility already. But a few stragglers were left walking through the hallways toward the many exits. Christopher could see his breath in the hallway. In just an hour the temperature had dropped about 10 degrees inside. The walkie crackled back to life.
“This is south garage door one.” The man on the other end of the walkie said.
“I’m looking for the sheriff. Is he still with you?” Christopher asked.
“No. He and his assistant left here.”
“Christopher.” Another voice interrupted. “This is Gene in water. The sheriff is with me. We’re in water HQ if you want to join us.”
“Thanks Gene. I’ll be there in 5.” Christopher clipped the walkie talkie back to his belt and pulled the mitten portion of his gloves over the fingerless part. He had bought these gloves eight years ago and somehow managed to never lose them. So many other pairs of gloves and gone. But these were still a pair and undamaged. He had been showing his friends from Chicago around the hardware store and decided to buy a pair of gloves while he was there. His friends from Chicago were a married couple about to have their first baby. She wanted to make a sock monkey for it so they searched the city for a hardware store that carried the special sock monkey socks with the red heel. Next to the red heel socks were fingerless mitten gloves made of the same material. He bought them on impulse, fully intending to lose them one at a time like every other pair of gloves he had ever owned. But somehow they stuck with him. They were lucky gloves. His sock monkey gloves.