Page 78 of Hunted By Fae
TESNI
I never planned on being here in the dead of winter. The longest, most brutal trip that I can’t escape.
Now, Canada’s harsh winter is my prison.
The frost of the winds is lashing at my face, and fuck if it doesn’t hurt.
I feel every strike, a whip to raw cheeks.
My nose trickles, and each time I lift the sleeve of my parka and wipe, the fabric is damp, and it just smears the snot over my raw, flaky skin.
The insulated hood is pulled over my head, the drawstrings tugged tight, but a fraction of my face is still exposed to the deep winter winds—and it’s the fucking worst.
I have no choice but to endure it.
Wehave no choice but to suffer it.
The soles of my snowboots crunch on the snowy highway with the others; the crunching of a dozen bootsteps pressing down on snow.
Silence is preferred in the blackout.
But it’s hard to be quiet when the roads have snow inches deep, and we’re forced to move onwards.
Since the world has ended, there are no local governments to battle the elements. Snow is thick in this city, no plowing, no salting, no gritting.
Snow is untouched here. Wild.
It drifts down the cold air and settles over the road, makes hills of abandoned cars. But after these harsh months, it’s starting to ease. I feel that in the steps that I follow around the nose of a car, buried on the highway.
The further north we go, the worse the winter should be. That’s why we travelled down to the west coast of the US, waited out the bulk of the cold season down there, before we routed back up across the border, and found our way further inland.
If I had it my way, we would have chased the heat through the darkness, gone down south to hotter places, like Mexico.
Instead, we’re glued to the west of the North American continent, assaulted by the freezing temperatures of Canada’s winter.
Even gloved, my hand that’s gripped firm around the rope lassoed between the whole group, is raw.
If we had come just a month earlier, the snow would have been up to our knees—and there would be no survival, not in these dark ages, not for us.
This harsh winter brings not just rain and winds, but snow and ice, so it’s best to stick to main roads and highways when we can.
If we venture off too far, too remote, the winter is worse, because all of a sudden, you’re walking on a frozen lake in the dark—and the ice might break.
It’s possible that happened to someone from our group.
In the time we spent moving around California and Nevada, we picked up people along the way, but we have lost a total of four on the journey back up to British Columbia.
I think we just lost them.
The missing people from our group maybe let go of the rope unspooled between us to tie a shoelace or pick up a dropped hat, and that was it, or they got turned around, or passed out from the exhaustion and couldn’t call out for us to stop—
And that’s how easy it is.
Gone.
Into the darkness, forever.
Our group is down to twelve now.
