She finds her way east by dead reckoning.
Twice she gets completely turned around, finding herself heading down a long, open road without any landmarks, sure that she's headed in the wrong direction. At one point it gets bad enough that she starts trembling, every part of her body, and she's convinced she'll never be able to stop.
Eventually she realizes that she can smell the ocean, the first foggy tendrils of wet sand, fish, and salt that never go away no matter what season it is. Up ahead the eastern skyline has begun to lighten beneath its veil of snow, gray dawn dragging itself into the faint encrustation of starlight like old age crawling up to smother something that was once bright and beautiful. In fact, the whole landscape has a lifeless pallor to it. It feels insubstantial, weightless, monochromatic, as if the road and trees and the sloping, snow-covered hills had been sucked dry of all life during the night, leaving only their outlines, ash sculptures that might crumble and spill if she bumped into them.
In the back of the Expedition, the thing inhabiting her husband's body doesn't speak. She can only hear it rustling around every minute or so, a sibilant restlessness of flesh and fabric that's barely loud enough to be distinguished from the hum of the tires on the road.
Out of nowhere a seagull dips across the sky, then kites upward, and her eyes follow it as the road curves to the right. Directly in front of her the gull banks sharply, rising into a part of the sky where dawn has not yet penetrated, and vanishes among what's left of the stars. Sue thinks of the sea, whose proximity is somehow more reassuring to her than the coming of daybreak. Maybe it's the way that the ocean brings the land to an end, a sense that whatever happens, there can be no more route beyond it.
There's a sign coming up and as she gets closer, Sue realizes it doesn't look like the other towns' signs. This one is bigger, the block letters carved into a slab of light, unfinished wood, pine or cedar, and mounted on massive, bare logs by the side of the road: