Chapter 1: The Snow Turns Red
Time… time had seemed to slow to a crawl. The sky above was slate gray, like a giant slab of concrete hanging over them, ready to fall down and crush the Nike campus. Cold. Izzy Allen had been cold for what seemed like an eternity.
He struggled to remember what sunshine felt like. Had it been a month straight? A month of gray skies and frozen ground. The trampled grass of the compound crunched under his feet every time he walked the wall. He hated walking the wall. He could hear them moaning over there, the dead, doing their own parody of his walk, looking for a way inside.
They hadn't had a breach yet, and the wall was holding up just fine, despite the fact that the dead ringed the wall ten-feet deep at spots. How many of them were there? A thousand, a hundred thousand? He shivered in his coat, an obscenely bright jacket that he had found abandoned and forgotten in an office closet in one of the buildings.
The buildings were empty now, the dead cleared out months ago. It wasn't the dead they had to worry about. On cue, his stomach growled, as if mocking the moans of the dead. "It's alright, buddy. We'll get some grub soon," he told his stomach.
Allen's boots crunched through a patch of snow that still clung stubbornly to the ground, hidden in the shade of the wall. He looked up at the sky, at its gray fullness, and a small dot of white fluttered down and landed on the tip of his nose. "Fuck you," he said to the cloud, fully aware that he had started talking to things that weren't alive a whole lot more than he used to. Another dozen flakes sifted down out of the sky, and then they appeared everywhere, falling on the skin of his neck and causing him to pull his bright, orange jacket tighter.
He gripped his rifle tighter as a shape approached him. It walked like a person, not like one of the dead, but tensions had been high in the compound. He had heard the whispers. They weren't needed anymore. The Nike residents had completed their training and had made it through the clearing of the compound with few casualties. Tejada had trained them well. Now they thought they knew it all. They didn't want Allen and the other soldiers around. Even if he hadn't heard the whispers, all he had to do was look them in the eyes to see what they thought. "Go away," those eyes said. "Fuck off," those eyes said. He nodded at the man as he passed, but the man didn't acknowledge him.
Allen kept his guard up, even after he passed the man who was doing his own circuit of the wall in the opposite direction. He listened for a pause in the man's gait, a cessation of crunching as he stopped and turned to level his rifle at Allen's back. But there was nothing. The man kept walking, and the snowflakes fell harder, the wind picking up. The wind momentarily drowned out the skittering of fleshless fingertips on the other side of the wall.
He continued his circuit through the forest at the edge of the compound and over the hills and hummocks on its southern edge. He passed by the pond, frozen and cold, until he was on the backside of the campus, the tall, dark, office buildings looming into the sky. By the time he made it around again, the ground glowed white with fresh snow. His boots crunched through the powder, compacting it and making a slick slush that would be frozen completely by the time Allen came back around. Circuit after circuit he walked, catching the skittering of fingertips only when the wind lulled for a brief moment before picking up and howling through the buildings and trees of the compound.
How long could they last? How long could they keep the peace here? They should have gone when they had the chance, before the cold had moved in, before the snows had fallen. The Nike people said that the winter had been unusually cold, that they seldom saw snow of this magnitude. Perhaps Mother Nature herself had joined in to try and kill the rest of humanity as it clung stubbornly to life. He wouldn't put it past the bitch.
As time wound on and the snow piled up, he passed the man again and again. Each time he nodded. Each time, the man ignored him. And every time Allen passed the man, he felt an itch between his shoulder blades, as if the man were aiming at him through the scope of his rifle. But the gunshot never came, and his hunger grew, and by the time his shift was over, his boots were soaked and wet, his feet felt like two blocks of ice, and the beard on his face was heavy with the frost of his own cooled sweat.
Relieved by Day, a basic sort of man, Allen stepped into the security building, the place that he and the other men called home. He found Epps and Brown playing cards in the lobby. They never left the lobby of their building unguarded now.
"Pull up a chair?" Brown queried. Allen shook his head. He wasn't in the mood. He moved past the men. They were literally playing for peanuts. That phrase used to mean playing for nothing, but now it meant everything. With food scarce, that pile of peanuts, packed with calories and energy, was worth a fortune these days. But he had never been good at poker. He had always been shit at it, in fact. He wasn't
