
The Girl in the Snow
Tony Talbot
"We should have gone back."
I looked at the fire and didn't answer her. The snow falling monotonously from the sky fizzled when it reached the heat, the only sound apart from our rough breathing. The blizzard looked like it had passed on, but I knew that was only a palliative in this dying world.
After a few minutes, she shifted position, closer to the flames. "I said --"
I hurled a chunk of wood at the fire, make it clatter and spit angry red sparks. "I heard."
Kate peered at me through the layers that covered her face, only the green of her eyes visible. I couldn't remember what she looked like without the layers, it had been so long. Was she still beautiful? Had the frostbite turned her perfect nose into a black mess?
The last time...the last time had been in Kansas, some highway motel that still had intact windows. The bed had creaked and moaned beneath us as much as the wind outside. I remembered the feel of her ribs, the narrowness of her cheeks where there used to be corpulence. I hadn't been with her since.
She folded her arms and shivered. "I think we should go back."
"No one ever goes back. You know that."
"I keep seeing her blink though. We could be there in an hour."
"An hour there is an hour back. How bad was she hurt? Is she dead already? How much will she slow us down? We have to keep moving south."
She tilted her head.
"Why?"
I looked up sharply at that. She knew the answer as well as I did. The glaciers were moving again, eating the land at a rate of a mile a day. It hadn't taken long for society to crumble before them. Internet? What good was that when there was no electricity? Roads? What good were they when they clogged with dead and frozen cars, dead and frozen people inside them?
Run south, they told what was left of us, run south as far as you can. Maybe you can meet the glaciers coming from Antarctica and be crushed in the middle. How long did the last ice age remain? Ten thousand years?
She picked up a stick and moodily prodded the dying fire. "What's the point of going south? You're thinking it as much as I am. Ten thousand years to wait until the ice retreats."
She shook her head. "We won't be around to see it, so what's the point? Maybe we should try to save someone else as well. Or what have we become?"
I hauled open the frozen door of a pickup truck behind me and raked the frozen occupants out into the snow. They were beyond caring, but the shelter might keep us alive until the morning, unless we were lucky and froze to death overnight.
I clambered into the back seat, closed my eyes and tried to sleep, tried not to see the girl in the snow.
\*\*\*
We'd come around a snarl of cars, and there was a black Range Rover straddled across two lanes. On the ground was the girl, perhaps ten or twelve, lightly covered in fresh snow.
Dead, I thought, without even registering it. The only oddity about her was that she hadn't curled into a foetal ball to keep her fading body heat.
Dead, I thought again, calm in my certainty.
Dead, I could handle. Dead, I had seen a thousand times.
Then, just one part of her moved, something I would have missed a second earlier or a second later.
She blinked.
We should save someone else, Kate said, or what have we become?
I shifted against the hard back seat, and tried not to hear the wind start to pick up outside, tried not to think about the girl in the snow, the others we might have passed, the others we should have saved, all the dead cars we had passed without looking inside, the others, the others.
\*\*\*
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http://www.tony-talbot.co.uk

