THE LAST GAMES: PROJECT PANDORA

CHAPTER VI: T H E F R E E Z E

After hours of marching through the cold landscape, shivering and shaking, I don't seem to have got very far. The Last City is still a considerable distance. All I pass is dead bushes and foliage. I am starting to lose feeling in my arms and legs, stumbling into trees and so on. Every time I breathe, steam fills the air around me. I trip on a small rock, my arms are stiff with cold so I struggle to get up. The Sun is shining up in the sky, but it's not helping at all. In fact, I think the back of my neck is sunburnt. I'm just walking along. One foot in front of the other. My legs have grown heavy. I think I'll just catch a break for a few minutes. I find a dead tree and slowly sit, puffing and panting like a dog on a hot summers day.
Five minutes later I am still lying here, against this tree. Thick snowy mist has flooded the area. All I see(which isn't very much at all), are long white blanketed carpets of snow that stretch for as long as the eye can see(which still isn't very far), except for a few dead bushes and trees and other dead things. Nothing living. Nothing at all. So this sort of looks like the aftermath of a nuclear war. An idea pops into my head. What if this is the aftermath of a nuclear war, that would explain everything. The nuclear war would have destroyed the Earths' ozone layer, and made Earth unsustainable for Human - or any - life. But something tells me the answer is not that simple. Nothing is simple. Not if you think about it. Especially not in this world. I sigh.
Then something catches my eye. Some colour, and colour has became very scarce all of a sudden, so it is very hard to miss. My eyes swoop to see what it came from, but it has disappeared. Odd. All I see is a dead bush. I think I'm starting to hallucinate. Must be hyperthermia or something. But then I see it again. A flash of colour, and his time it's behind the bush. I blink and rub my eyes. Then I hear a low toned growling sound, and a thing walks out from behind the bush. It has a thick coat of all sorts of hot and cold colours, which is the first thing I notice. The second thing I notice is its' shape: it has a strong heavy build, stands on four legs, - and most unsettling - has three heads. And the last things I notice are it's ever changing eyes - always a different combination of colours - and it's blood-covered, sharp, carnivorous teeth. Sort of like a cheetah if you can't see colour and you don't count the three heads. I start to panic and quickly stand up.
"Nice kitty?" I slowly reach down and grab a stick and - terrified- I throw it. The thing turns it head long enough for me to snatch my gun and aim it at its head. And then it leaps off and disappears into the distance. I better get moving, oh, and did I mention that it's like negative a bazillion degrees? Well it is, and I start trudging off towards the mountain that I can no longer see in this fog, thinking how badly that encounter could have ended.

I have finally reached The Last City, which means I only have a few more miles to go, but the good thing is that I'm not cold anymore. In fact, there isn't a flake of snow in the whole city. When I entered, there was this ring around the city. On the outside, snow. On the inside, no snow. It is so much warmer than the other side of this heat-dome-thingy, but the temperature change is too big my body stings unbearably. And I haven't stopped shaking. I'll probably have to go around, but half of my brain is screaming I've finally found a place that's warm, and now I have to avoid it!? So I'm faced with two options.
To slowly walk around the entire city, shivering and freezing, but not stinging with pain. But at least I will not be faced with dead bodies of my dead friends.
Or to wait out the pain and stay strong for however long it will take for my body to adapt to the new climate after hours of freezing, only to soon return to the freezing cold twenty or so minutes later once I have walked the length of the city.
Both options seem ridiculous. But of course this is real life, not some cheesy movie with only two options. Suddenly I feel nudging on my side. I turn to see what it is and freak! It's that thing I found behind that bush, with the same stick I threw, in it's mouth. Once I recover myself enough to think strait, a third option comes to me. And, well, it doesn't look like it wants to eat me, so what's the worst that could happen? I mean other than me dying or getting mercilessly eaten by a monstrous cheetah. But first I'm just going to step out of the heat-dome-thingy because the pain is killing me. Also, I think I've decided on that name. Heat-dome-thingy. Has a nice ring to it. Nah? Now I know I'm going crazy.