No Way Out

Chapter 6: Sierra

December 6, 2015. Three months in.

The cool, Alaskan breeze seeped through her tangled hair. Her fingers wrapped around the handle of her knife, and a gun strapped to her belt, she stomped a fire out, and proceeded to zip her jacket all the way up.

"Come on Jace," she said, turning towards her little brother. "Let's go find mom and dad."

Jace placed his knife in the holster on his belt, "Okay. Is there still a track?"

"Snow covered it up. Let's just get up to that hill, and we'll scope it out from up there," Sierra pointed to a hill less than a mile away. "Hopefully the snow clears up a little, so we can see more than three feet in front of us. Mom said that if we got split up, then they would find us. I'll hold her to that."

The snow had risen over a foot in only an hour, and the frozen corpses on the ground were being covered completely. They were making their way to the top of the hill when they saw, what looked like, a tent.

Just as they were approaching the tent, Jace tripped over the hand of a freezing corpse.

"JACE!" Sierra had always been protective of Jace, and now that the dead walk the earth, she had to be more cautious than ever.

"I'm fine." Jace assured her as he stood up, shaking snow off of his jacket. "This thing can barely move, anyway," he said as he pointed towards the corpse that had tripped him up.

Sierra unfastened her knife holster, "You can never be too careful these days, Jace." She shoved the blade into the corpses temple, then proceeded to wipe the blood from her knife on a black cloth she had started to carry with her. "Start filling the jars. I'll check the tent," she ordered.

Sierra creeped slowly to the battered tent, and, hesitantly, unzipped it.

Only a few yards away from Sierra, the storm blocked Jace's view of the tent. He was patting snow into the multiple Mason Jars they had been carrying with them. Blind by the snow, and deaf from the layers of clothes around his head, Jace was unable to notice the struggle of his sister behind him, being attacked by two corpses.

"AGH!" Sierra was wrestling one corpse down while the other was on her back, chomping at her thick jacket. The thought of finding her parents stopped her for a moment. She quickly thought about being home, with Tristan, watching stupid TV shows that he forced her to endure. Then something snapped her back into reality. She grabbed a travel-size cooler, and placed it over one corpses head. The other corpse remained on her back until someone, who she thought was Jace, grabbed it by its shirt, and kicked its face in.

"Sierra," the voice of her mother caused her to forget about the remaining corpse still grabbing at her arm. It wasn't untill the cooler fell off of the corpse's face when she plunged a knife into its skull.

Sierra turned around, anxious to see her parents. As she saw her mother's face, all of the worry left her body. She finally felt free again... for a moment. "Mom? Where is dad?"

A tear seeped out of her mothers eye, and Sierra knew the answer to her question. She almost started to cry, herself, until she heard her little brother shout in excitement, "MOM!" Jace hugged her with so much force, one could consider it a tackle. They all hugged each other for a long time until Jace asked where his dad was. As much as she didn't want to talk about it, their mother, Clarissa, say both of them down to explain the kids off their father.

"It was about three days ago. We were going cabin to cabin, looking for you two. It had been at least a week since we had last looked for food, and we were starting to get really weak. Your dad decided we needed to take a short break, which turned into a short nap, which turned into both of us falling into a deep sleep. When I woke up, a group of men was walking away from the cabin and I could hear what they were saying." She started to cry as she was talking, but she still managed to get the words out. "They were talking about where they were going to take his body..."

Sub-concisely, Sierra had already prepared herself for this. She didn't want to admit it, but she always had this feeling that everything wasn't going to work out.

After they finished grieving, the sun had already set, and the temperature was doing by the minute. "Ok, we need to get this fire up if we want to make it through the night." Sierra said, but little did she know, that fire wasn't going to be much good in a few hours.

The fire was built, and they were in their sleeping bags. Meanwhile, the snow was falling harder and harder on the trees and the ground around them. In the midst of their sleep, a clump of snow drooped of a branch above them, falling directly onto the fire.

When morning came, Sierra woke, feeling cooler than she could've possibly imagined she could. She struggled to move as the snow was now turning to ice on her clothes, but she managed to stand. As she looked around her, her family was nowhere to be found. She looked down to put her boots on, when she noticed something under the snow. Horrified, she realized that it was the hand of her little brother. With bare hands, she clawed at the ice and snow covering Jace. Her fingers were bleeding by the time  she could see his face. She could tell that he was gone. With no control of her emotions she found that her mother had met the same fate as her brother.

***

It had been two weeks before Sierra made the decision to find her way back to Tristan. She had never felt the pain that she had been feeling over the past two weeks, but she knew what she had to do...