The Will To Live✔️

Chapter 01: The Dark & The Cold

                                                                 PART ONE
                                                    –The Great Desolation–

Greg Walker opened his eyes and stared up at a sky of dead gray iron.

For a few seconds, he could feel nothing, and wondered vaguely if he had been paralyzed. Or perhaps he was dead. But as some inscrutable division of time eked by, he became aware of things. A madly shrieking wind. Brittle snowflakes descending from those dead skies. And pain. It was nebulous and thin, more the memory of pain than of pain itself, but he felt it. This still didn't quite answer the question of whether or not he was dead.

Greg tried to speak.

Something like a wheeze came out of him, and that seemed to invoke slightly more pain, though it was still distant and weak. The dead didn't feel pain...or they always felt pain, maybe. But this pale imitation of suffering didn't seem to hold up on either end of that spectrum. Greg tried to focus, to get some sensation going in his body, to do something.

He said, "Am I dead?"

The words actually escaped his lips this time, and he could hear his own voice. Something seemed to snap inside of him, like a heavy switch being thrown, and suddenly the world sharpened into focus, and then a powerful pulse of what might have been anger surged through him. He jerked, or tried to at least, and felt his body move.

"I'm not dead," he growled, and became slowly aware of the fact that he was immensely cold. Perhaps colder than he had ever been in his life.

Greg sat up and began shivering.

He surveyed an icebound wasteland.

Where in the hell was he?

Cognition was slow, but his brain gradually began to come back online. Upright, he had to get upright. Greg had goals to complete, things to do, even if right now he didn't know what those things might be. His brain kept catching as it restarted, like a lighter that wouldn't light or an engine that wouldn't turn over. Warm. He needed warm. Above all else. Or he was going to die. He began shivering more violently as his body awoke.

Okay, he had to think through this.

How to achieve warmth?

Fire was the first word that came to mind. He had to make a fire. Images of wood and tinder drifted with an aching lethargy through his brain as he sat there freezing in the snow. Somewhere ahead of him, he thought he could see a body of water and stands of trees.

"Get up," Greg whispered through gritted, chattering teeth. "Get up."

He willed his muscles to move, his body to respond, and finally it did. He got slowly, painfully to his feet. Looking down at himself, he saw that some of his ballistics armor was missing, and his uniform was torn in places, and stained with blood. He remembered...a Pelican. He had been riding a Pelican down from orbit. And there had been others. And...

No. He could remember later.

Memory was a luxury right now. At this very moment, he needed to focus the whole of his being on getting to shelter and making a fire. Because already his senses were feeding him more information. The daylight was rapidly bleeding from the skies, the snow was falling faster and harder, the winds were shrieking more powerfully. A storm was on rapid approach, his brain whispered to him, and if he didn't get inside, he would die. He would fall back asleep and he would freeze to death, nothing but a solid lump buried in a snowdrift.