The Dying

     It was a cold morning— colder than Ana was comfortable with. Much colder. She pulled her quilt tighter around her shoulders and pressed herself to the bare, dirt floor of her home. Even with the door closed and cracks sealed against drafts, even though the entire home, designed to trap heat, was fifty feet underground with only a thin tunnel connecting it to the city, it was cold. Ana may have been imagining it, but the ground seemed colder than it had been yesterday.
    A rumble in her stomach drove Ana to stand from her cot. Her head was mere inches away from the low ceiling of her home. Shivering, Ana exchanged her quilt for a heavy wool jacket with matching pants to go over her wool underclothes. After a moment's hesitation, she donned heavy boots over her woolen socks. The boots were new; she didn't used to need them. No one did. A year ago, the ground was still warm enough for one to traverse the city of earthen tunnels and rooms barefoot. Nowadays, it was risky even to sleep without thick layers of clothing.
    Bracing herself for the rush of cold, Ana opened the door. It was always colder in the tunnels than in the little homes that retained the body heat of their inhabitants. More open space meant more dispersion of heat, and though thin, this tunnel was connected to the network of far larger tunnels, which once had been designed for large amounts of foot traffic. Now, in the midst of what people simply called the Dying, the network was more of a mass grave.
    Ana reached the end of the small tunnel; at the intersection, the floor shifted from dirt to stone. The engineers, so long ago, had done this on purpose: small, residential spaces were in the dirt and clay zones of the earth, and the larger communal spaces were in the stone, because the stone conducted more heat and kept the larger spaces warm more efficiently. Ana had always found this fact ironic, considering that the stone had become unforgivingly cold, claiming many lives.
    As she neared the dining area, Ana picked her way around the bodies. Once, when the Dying was a new and unprecedented phenomenon, Ana had wept for the dead. She no longer had tears left to weep. The Dying had claimed more lives in this year than anyone could count, and those who were bothered by the bodies had largely died off. Ana's horror had been replaced with terror, then grief and finally, hunger. And cold.
    Ana walked under the arch of stone that marked the beginning of the dining area. The tables were covered with bins of nonperishables. At the beginning of the Dying, the public opinion was that a ration should be enforced in case food production suffered due to the cold. It had, of course, but with only a hundredth of the population remaining, there was a surplus of food. Ana ate her fill of bread and dried fruit, both hard from age and cold. The resistance between her jaws generated a fantastic, radiating warmth that Ana savored more than the food. She was thirsty, but the bottled water on the tables was long frozen. Common practice was to bury the bottles in the dirt of one's residence in order to thaw. It was taking longer and longer for Ana's ice to melt, these days. The cold from above was permeating the city more and more, and the warmth that was supposed to combat it, the radiating heat from the Everflame at the core of the planet, was subsiding.
    Hunger satiated, Ana meandered out of the dining area. Recently she'd been spending her days walking, just going around and around and finding her way back to her home when she got tired. She had explored so many tunnels and rooms, stepped on the hands of countless frozen corpses and taken things out of abandoned vendor stalls. She was a scavenger of her own city, a shameful thief— yet she no longer felt shame. It wasn't like anyone was going to catch her, as the vendors that spent their time standing still in large, open spaces had been the first to succumb to the cold.
    Ana walked and walked, traversing the tunnels she knew like the back of her hand and ignoring the frosty eyes staring blankly at her from all directions. She was cold down to her bones; the layers upon woolen layers had stopped being enough a while back. Within her boots and socks, Ana's toes were beginning to go numb, and inside her gloves, her fingertips followed suit. Ana felt like throughout the Dying, it hadn't just been the planet producing less heat, but her own body as well. Or perhaps her body and others' had evolved to produce less heat, since the earth did it for them— The Everflame, the inferno so intensely hot it was said to be colorless waves of pure energy, had done that for them. But the Everflame began its decay a year ago, and the population had entered the era of the Dying.
    Ana's stride slowed. She was so, so tired. Her muscles ached from the constant walking and she could hardly feel her skin. Surviving felt harder and harder every day— and more futile. The Dying was called the Dying for a reason.
    Ana came to a stop and sat beside a corpse, like they were old friends. She may have recognized the face some other time, but right now all she noticed was the hoarfrost covering the corpse's cheeks and nose, the cloudy, frozen eyes. Ana did not want her eyes to look like that when she passed. She closed her eyes and felt them tear up, just enough that her eyelids froze shut. Ana breathed out and leaned against the stone wall. Her breath carried the last bit of body heat she had, and she fell deeply asleep. She did not breathe back in.