The Annies made him feel colder just by the way they were dressed. Short sleeves, shorts, all of the Annies were dressed for summer, and watching the occasional Annie walk through the snow in bare feet made him feel nauseous. Frostbite. He knew the word—had even seen some pictures of it online back when the internet was still a thing. The Annies didn't seem to suffer from it. They were as oblivious to it as they were to everything else. The only thing they noticed was human flesh moving through the cold, gray morning.
The flesh of the Annies looked different than it had in the summer. In the summer, they had turned almost to leather. Now they were drying out in the cold, and that leather had begun to crack and split. He wondered how long the Annies would be able to hold onto the skin on their faces. How long until they were nothing but skeletal faces with tendons? Disturbingly, their eyes still seemed to be intact, none the worse despite the weather and their own decomposition.
The soldiers were halfway through the apartment complex when the heat from his own exertions finally started to catch up to him. That was good. He couldn't get the images of frostbite out of his head. He remembered seeing a picture of a man lying in a hospital bed, his lips and nose turning black on his face. That meant the skin was dead, and that meant the skin had to be cut away. Walt brushed at his face absentmindedly. He'd have to keep his eyes out for a scarf. Maybe that would help stave off frostbite.
He looked at the others, admiring their beards. He was still too young to grow one. His cheeks were covered in fine hairs, not quite peach fuzz, but not far from it. Allen, in particular, had a nice brown beard growing on his face. As another gust of wind cut through the apartment complex, howling like an actual live animal, he wondered if he would ever get to the point where he would have a nice beard.
A bald male Annie appeared in his path. Walt let his rifle drop to his side and pulled American Express free. He swung it in an arc, the orange glitter of the ball muted by the gray day. The ball swung and smashed into the head of an Annie. It dropped to the ground, and Walt eyed it for a second to make sure it wasn't going to start crawling. It remained still, its skull broken.
They continued onward, coming to the end of the apartment complex. Walt scratched absentmindedly at his cheek as if that could stimulate the growth of thick, coarse, beard hairs.
Then they were on the streets again, moving quickly and quietly. Well, as quiet as they could with two feet of snow on the ground. They marched without speaking, a line of people tromping down a street named Cornell Road. Lines of townhomes and apartments blocked the sky to their left. To their right, businesses that had seen their last customer sat empty and abandoned. The stalled traffic was thinner out here. If they had a working car, they could have hopped in a vehicle and driven pretty easily. Fat chance of that with two feet of snow, though. They'd need to find a snowplow now, and there wasn't a lot of those sitting around ready to be taken out for a spin when the apocalypse had first started in the summer.
That's how Walt thought of the times he lived in… the apocalypse. He had no misconceptions about being one of the chosen. His life, his continued existence, was just a matter of coincidence. He was just a random bullet or stumble away from being one of the Annies himself.
He wondered what that would be like. Would he still have some sort of semblance of what was going on around him? Would it be like sitting in the passenger seat of a semi-truck while some unknown force piloted the truck around? That wouldn't be so bad, he guessed.
The wind howled against his ears, and he wished for something more substantial to cover them with than his thin brown hair. His hair had never been this long. It was greasy and hung in chunks down to his shoulders. He had looked in a mirror at the assisted living facility, and he hadn't even recognized the man that looked back at him. Mirrors were not a priority in the apocalypse, so when he did manage to catch his reflection in a mirror, he noticed all sorts of changes.
His face, always rounded and soft, now looked more defined, as if the real him had finally pushed through the cocoon of his old, child-like face. His eyes scared him now. They were brown and cold, more intense than he remembered. He had tried smiling in the mirror, but it looked forced, unnatural. In the end, he decided that he looked like a man now. How funny that all it took was a few months living in the apocalypse to make that happen.
The road continued on ahead of them, and they walked, trudging, huddling in against the cold. No one talked. No one had anything to say. Behind them, the trail of the dead shuffled forward, breaking the snow they had left untouched in their wake. If only there was some damn way to get the Annies to walk ahead of them, then walking down the
