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sharing his own video on YouTube. “Remember the first night we got there?”
    Heather’s face dropped. “No.”
    Marcus nodded, and Ian let loose a whistle.
    “No, Marc, come on!” Heather pleaded.
    “And…” he hit a button, “we’re uploading.”
    Ashley turned to her sister. “Hope Mom and Dad don’t see that.”
    Heather hit the back of Marcus’ seat.
    “Hey, Ian,” Marcus said softly, ignoring the blows to the back of his seat, “just found this video on YouTube about a school teacher. The caption says that when she was vacationing in Quebec during winter break, she got trashed one night and decided to sing karaoke at a karaoke bar. Only it wasn’t a karaoke bar.”
    “Marc!”
    But everyone was laughing too hard to hear her protest, her drunken voice singing U2’s “Angelof Harlem” through the phone that Marcus was holding up to the roof of the car.
    Once the video was over, Ian suggested that someone check the weather to see when this storm was supposed to hit and where.
    They were passing frozen lakes and ponds all around them, and the scene was straight from some winter fantasy. But the sky above was from a different sort of vision, its ashen smear heading toward them with ominous foreboding.
    “I’ll do it,” Heather answered, still muttering something about what her co-workers and students would think if they found her on the internet standing on a restaurant table and singing into a celery stick.
    “Is everyone’s phone charged?” Ian asked.
    The airline they’d gotten a deal from charged a hundred bucks for carry-ons, and so anything they didn’t need in their pockets ended up beneath the plane. Phone chargers, extra clothes, deodorant… Even Heather’s purse had been shoved into a suitcase at the last minute, Ian begging her to take her wallet and to leave the Marry Poppins’ bag below.
    “Ninety percent,” Heather reported.
    “Seventy-six,” Ashley said.
    “Ninety-five,” Marcus recalled from memory.
    “We should try and conserve battery life as much as we can. Just in case.”
    “In case of what?” Ashley wanted to know.
    Ian shrugged, but his eyes inadvertently drifted away from the road ahead and to the trees pressing in on either side.
    Heather tracked her fiancé’s gaze in the rearview mirror, and the look on his face filled her with a sense of unease. “In case we break down?”
    His eyes flew off the wildlife and up to the mirror, finding her reflection in it. “I dunno. In case the storm hits and we have to hole up somewhere for a while.”
    “Yeah, well,” her eyes fell to the weather report on her phone, “the radar has most of the state completely white in the next hour.”
    “Great.” Marcus groaned. His phone sounded, a little hip-hop beat announcing the arrival of a new text message, and he brought it out of his pocket again. The number was blocked. He read the message, and his face fell flat.
     
    YOU ARE GOING TO DIE OUT HERE, NIGGER
     
    Staring at the screen, he frowned, stunned. Then his hand began to quiver, and he clicked the phone off.
    “Who was it?” Ashley asked.
    “No one.”
    He turned his attention out the window and tried losing the cold chill through the thick, snow-coated forest racing by them. Despite the emotions such a bizarre and random threat raised, he knew what had happened, or at least what he thought made the most sense. Both he and Heather had just posted videos online, their location being tagged and thus enabling anyone who watched the video (someone most likely following one of their accounts) to know where they were. Though, whether the “out here” mentioned in the text was supposed to be in reference to the ski hills of Quebec or Route 30 was unclear. Did the security and location settings on his phone allow their GPS coordinates to be stamped to the video? If so, then that had to be his explanation, and a friend was either playing a prank on him or someone who didn’t like him much was trying to get beneath