Cold World by P Mattern

Author:P Mattern [Mattern, P]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: CHBB Publishing
Published: 2019-03-31T16:00:00+00:00

* * *

The cold doesn’t register at first, because we are so full of adrenalin. We stay close to the exterior walls of the Naris complex, afraid of being seen, all the while checking out the strange, yet somehow vaguely familiar terrain.

There aren’t enough old-time movies to prepare us for this. There is a sun in the sky, but its light provides no warmth.

In the end, without any words being exchanged, we scamper off toward a tangled growth of trees and tall grass, for the sole purpose of hiding ourselves until we can get clothing on.

By the time we reached a fairly secluded spot, we are shivering so badly we can hardly manage to take our packs off and retrieve the blankets. Rollo peels off his soaking trunks and jokes that the fastest way to get warm is to cuddle up. I take him seriously, and add my blanket to his. Hypothermia makes you realize what’s really important in life.

We both laugh, and I get warmer. Once we start to get dry, we finally put our clothes back on. The clothes are also ice cold, so we get some fresh blankets and try to make a bubble of warmth on our own. We’re also famished, so we eat some of the stuff we raided from Bree’s stash, drink water, and start to feel better. We start to laugh at each other, spontaneously, and share a high five. We’ve made it.

We figure it’s the afternoon, wherever we are. Obviously, there’s still some vegetation growing despite the cold. The landscape reminds me of the tundra we studied in class, except for the trees.

“Weird,” Rollo mutters after taking out a pair of binoculars that I am grateful to see he has packed, “I see dwarf willows, birch, spruce trees, and alder.”

He abruptly shifted to surveying the landscape in a Southernly direction. I had a compass, not a good one but kind of a toy one that I had packed. I think I got it as a prize for junior safety inspectors, but it worked after a fashion and I knew what Rollo was thinking.

If we traveled South it might be warmer.

“It might get easier closer to the equator,” he says, as if he’s reading my mind, “More vegetation, maybe some food, maybe even some villages above ground, we don’t even know.”

“How cold do you think it is?” I ask, knowing Rollo has a thermal indicator on his backpack.

“Right now, about zero degrees Celsius, maybe a few less” he says soberly.

“It doesn’t seem too bad,” I say, grinning, “I think this is doable. This is not the ‘uninhabitable terrain’ they tried to scare us with. What the hell?”

Rollo gives me a sad look.

“Billy, you don’t get it,” he says, shaking his head from side to side. “This is as warm as it gets in a tundra. It’s summer here right now. We’ll need to get moving soon, because we got a lot of distance to cover before three seasons of winter set in.”

I let

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.