Snow

Chapter One

The snow had stopped.

One second, it was coming down, ravaging the earth with its white flurries, just as it had been for the past six months.

Then it was gone.

No flakes falling through the air. No icy hail wrecking everything in its path.

Just a dark cloudy sky.

My fingertips went to the clouds, my ruined gray gloves offering minimal protection from the cold. A gray hue coated the earth. I waited patiently, knowing a snowflake would fall. This had to be an illusion. My fingers splayed out in the air. I felt the frosty breeze against my dry, cracked skin.

Nothing.

My arm dropped back to my side; my mouth agape as I gazed skyward. It'd stopped. The snow had stopped. I couldn't wrap my head around it fast enough. How? Why now?

And then another thought: It wouldn't last long.

That was the mistake we'd made the last time the sky had stopped trying to kill us. The only difference now was that the sky had already destroyed us.

Humanity was dead.

Maybe there were survivors, but not humanity.

I had to keep moving. Stopping meant death. Falling meant death. Staying outside too long in an area as open as the white field I now stood in meant death. I had to reach warmth. Safety.

I knew my destination. I saw my goal ahead of me. The mere idea of a warm shelter kept me going. It was only a hope, of course: that the store I was headed to would somehow still have electricity. A very unlikely hope at that. If anything, at least I could scavenge supplies from it.

That was the one thing left keeping me human: hope. And I wouldn't let it go.

I forced myself to lift my heavy boots out of the snow and plant them down again. I trudged my way through the cold, focused on reaching shelter. It'd been an hour since I'd first sighted it – the top of a store jutting out from the landscape. Any reprieve from my constant trek through the cold was mercy.

It'd been a long time since I'd started this torturous march, trying to get as far away from my origin as possible. That was where it'd all gone wrong.

A chill went down my spine.

Blue-paneled suburban house. Perfectly cut lawn. Three bedrooms: one for Mom, one for my brother Colin, and one for me.

A sudden blast of wind hit my face and my arm instinctively blocked it. Just a little further. I pushed myself to move faster, to drag myself a bit quicker...

And then I saw it.

A glimmer of light amidst the spiraling flurries driven into the air by the harsh wind. My heart rate sped up. I stomped forward quicker as the wind battered me. One foot got caught on a particularly dense pack of ice and I tripped, my body propelling forward. I landed face-first, fingers splaying against its frozen surface.

I lifted my head.

The top of a large building with white-painted walls covered in multicolored graffiti stood in front of me. Words from a past age, before everything froze over, adorned the bricks.

I pushed myself off the ground, eyes focusing instead on the white light that leaked out of the glass windows of the store. A sign hung crookedly above the entrance with words that were impossible to read, their deformities too great to make out any solid letters.

The snow had eaten up most of the building, but it'd been tall enough to stay surfaced. The windows at the store's front were slightly open, creating an entrance.