Dark Matter(53)

Lethally cold.

I have no idea how far we’ve come from the box.

Does it even matter anymore, when we’re functionally blind?

This cold will kill us in a matter of minutes.

Keep moving.

Amanda has a faraway look in her eyes, and I wonder if it’s the shock setting in.

Her bare legs are in direct contact with the snow.

“It hurts,” she says.

Bending down, I lift her in my arms and stagger into the storm, holding Amanda tightly against me as her entire body shakes.

We’re standing in a vortex of wind and snow and killing cold, and it all looks exactly the same. If I don’t stare down at my legs, the motion of it all induces vertigo.

It occurs to me: we’re going to die.

But I keep going.

One foot in front of the other, my face now on fire from the cold, my arms aching from holding Amanda, my feet in agony as the snow works down into my shoes.

Minutes pass and the snow falls harder and the cold keeps biting.

Amanda is mumbling, delirious.

I can’t keep doing this.

Can’t keep walking.

Can’t keep holding her.

Soon—so soon—I will have to stop. Will sit in the snow and hold this woman I barely know, and we will freeze to death together in this awful world that isn’t even ours.

I think about my family.

Think about not ever seeing them again, and I try to process what that means as my control over the fear finally slips— There’s a house in front of us.

Or rather, the second story of a house, because its first floor has been completely buried in snow that’s drifted all the way up to a trio of dormer windows.

“Amanda.”

Her eyes are closed.

“Amanda!”

She opens them. Barely.

“Stay with me.”

I set her down in the snow against the roof, stumble toward the middle dormer, and put my foot through the window.

When I’ve kicked out all the sharpest jags of glass, I take hold of Amanda by her arms and pull her down into a child’s bedroom—a little girl’s, by the looks of it.

Stuffed animals.

A wooden dollhouse.

Princess paraphernalia.

A Barbie flashlight on the bedside table.

I drag Amanda far enough into the room that the snow pouring through the window can’t reach her. Then I grab the Barbie flashlight and move through the doorway into an upstairs hall.

I call out, “Hello?”

The house swallows my voice, gives nothing back.

All the bedrooms on the second floor stand empty. In most of them, the furniture has been removed.

Turning on the flashlight, I head down the staircase.

The batteries are low. The bulb emits a weak beam.

Moving off the stairs, I pass the front door into what used to be a dining room. Boards have been nailed across the window frames to support the glass against the pressure of the snow, which fills the frames entirely. An ax leans on the remnants of a dining-room table that’s been chopped down into burnable pieces of kindling.

I step through a doorway that opens into a smaller room.

The tepid light beam strikes a couch.

A pair of chairs almost completely stripped of their leather.

A television mounted above a fireplace overflowing with ashes.

A box of candles.

A stack of books.

Sleeping bags, blankets, and pillows have been spread across the floor in the vicinity of the fireplace, and there are people inside them.

A man.

A woman.

Two teenage boys.

A young girl.

Eyes closed.

Not moving.

Their faces blue and emaciated.

A framed photograph of the family at the Lincoln Park Conservatory, in a better time, rests on the woman’s chest, her blackened fingers still clutched around it.

Along the hearth, I see matchboxes, stacks of newspaper, a pile of wood shavings harvested from a cutlery block.

A second doorway out of the family room brings me into the kitchen. The refrigerator is open and barren, and the cabinets too. The countertops are covered with empty metal cans.

Creamed corn.

Kidney beans.

Black beans.

Whole, peeled tomatoes.

Soups.

Peaches.

The stuff that lives in the backs of cabinets and usually just expires from neglect.

Even the condiment jars have been scraped clean—mustards, mayonnaise, jellies.

Behind the overflowing trash can, I see a frozen puddle of blood and a skeleton—small, feline—stripped to the bone.

These people didn’t freeze to death.

They starved.

—

Firelight glows on the walls of the family room. I’m naked in a sleeping bag that’s inside of a sleeping bag that’s covered in blankets.

Amanda thaws out beside me in two sleeping bags of her own.

Our wet clothes are drying on the brick hearth, and we’re lying close enough to the fire that I can feel the warmth of it lapping at my face.

Outside, the storm rages on, the entire framework of the house creaking in the strongest gusts of wind.

Amanda’s eyes are open.

She’s been awake a little while, and we’ve already killed the two bottles of water, which are now packed with snow and standing on the hearth near the fire.