Ghost’s book can’t help us anymore. It doesn’t say anything about conjuring up food and uninfected water out of thin air. I heard Mom say to Mr. Cromwell that we only have three or four days of food and water left and then she wouldn’t know what to do. I don’t know what to do. Sometimes I wonder which is worse: the pain of hunger or the pain of extreme cold? And why is it so icy anyways? We’re in Northern Virginia, not Canada!
I’ve heard that in the final stages of hypothermia you feel warm and then you go to sleep and never wake up. That sounds fine to me. If Dorothy meant to kill herself by standing guard without her blanket and all her layers of clothing, I can understand why.
We talk little and move less to conserve the few calories we’ve got, but the uncontrolled shivering doesn’t help us at all. We had a brief moment of frantic movement when Jesse screamed one morning, “The zombies have got me! The zombies have got me! OwOwOwOwOw. They’re pulling my hair!” I think our body heat must have warmed up the ice under the pallets to a point that it melted and then refroze in the night, because it wasn’t a zombie that had Jesse by the hair, it was the roof—her hair had frozen into the roof.
We chopped her beautiful long hair off with the axe. It broke my heart to do it. Jesse cried the whole time, but without tears. That’s got to be a bad sign—how dehydrated must she be if her body doesn’t even have enough moisture to spare for tears?
One of the last conversations we had strength for left us on a bad note because it was Doom who headed it up. If we had the energy we would have told him to shut up, but we don’t. He told us that in two-thousand Sir Ranulph Fiennes tried to walk to the North Pole, solo and unsupported but his sleds fell thru the ice and he had to pull them back up by hand. This gave him severe frostbite on the tips of all the fingers of his left hand. The surgeons wanted him to keep the dead fingertips on for a few more months, they were hoping there’d be a regrowth of the remaining healthy tissue, but he couldn’t stand the pain those dying fingertips caused and he cut them off with a small saw, right above the blood and soreness. Doom also said something about the fluid in Ranulph’s blisters freezing into crystals and sounding like castanets whenever he would shake his hand, but that’s the last thing I heard because I just had to cover my ears.
I think this makes Doom more morbid than me. At least I talk about what happens to the body once it’s nothing but a shell and past feeling. It gives me the shivers thinking about blood and pain and saws being used on a living person. At this moment it feels like that could happen to us if we leave this tent and go out in those high winds and below-freezing temperatures.
And yet I find myself jealous of Mr. Fiennes. He was cold and he was alone, but he was free. If we could safely get off this roof we could search for food and survive. I think of him out in that winter wasteland and imagine that he suffered the same things we’re suffering. There’s the nonstop shivering and the constant chattering of teeth fit to break. There’s the shockingly pale skin, what little we can see that is that isn’t covered up. There’s the cracked and bleeding lips despite having wrapped our faces up in scarves with only our tired eyes on show. There’s the mental confusion that turns our brains into slush. And just to prove we really are at death’s door, there’s the hallucinations.
Hallucinations that we’re still home. Hallucinations that we’ve been rescued and we’re being interviewed on TV about our ordeal. Hallucinations that this never happened at all and I will need to get up for school soon. Hallucinations where my father arrives with the real army and takes us away. Hallucinations where I’m able to talk with the dead below and beg them to let us go. Hallucinations where Ghost is still alive and we’re dancing to our song. That’s my favorite one. I’ve starting to like these hallucinations instead of fear them.
We face inwards leaving our backs to the wind that whips us cruelly through the tent and blankets. We keep Jesse and Sarah at the middle so their small forms will not surrender to the frost, but they’re so still it’s hard to tell if they’re alive or dead. I look at our hunched figures and think of all those penguins on National Geographic huddling together with their young trying to survive the howling winds and snow that white-out their world.
And then, almost as suddenly as it began, it’s over. The cold that is, not our edge-of-existence crisis. The winds die down, the sun comes up, and the tent warms to the point where we are able to peel off layers and layers of filthy clothing. It takes a while to do this; it’s hard to do anything when you have no energy.
We feebly crawl our way out of the tent into the blinding sunlight. If we were fit and normal it would probably feel good to be able to move without all those layers of clothes; but our lack of energy holds us back. I struggle to focus as I try to get used to sunlight again. I blink and blink to make my eyes work again, and when they finally do, I wish they didn’t.
The dead are out there in droves, looking up at us, waiting. I’m not surprised at that. If anything, I bet they’re surprised we made it through the last three days. (I think it was three days. It’s hard to tell when you’re drifting in and out of reality.) No, the thing I’m surprised at is how much we resemble them. Starvation has robbed us of any sign of life. We now sport the same hollowed-out eyes and cheeks as the gaunt faces below. We hold ourselves the same way they do, which means we barely hold ourselves together at all. We’re slack-jawed and slump-shouldered, our arms dangling with no energy to lift them. And we all wear that permanently haunted look.
Jesse’s the first to speak, her voice so hoarse she sounds like our ninety-four year old grandfather before he passed away with emphysema. “Mom, is there anything to eat?”
My mother, who bears the most pained expression of all, hardly has enough voice to muster the expected, “No.”
“Anything left to drink?”
“No.” There it is. No comforting deceptions, no lies left to be told. Just ‘No.’
“I’m going back to bed then,” Jess croaks. But she doesn’t have the energy to make it back to the tent. She just turns away from the sight of the dead in the courtyard and rolls onto her side. Mom crawls over to Jess and does the same, enveloping my little sister in her arms. There’s a part of me, the part that learned first aid from those summer camps and more first aid from Notes From A Necrophobe, that wants me to shake them and yell, “Wake up! You’ll die if you don’t wake up!” The rest of me says, “What for?”
I watch Mr. Cromwell sit Indian style next to Mom and Jesse while holding Sarah in his lap. I turn away from the scene and look out into the distance, vainly searching the horizon for a sign of anything that could save us. That was when I felt Houston tap me lightly on the shoulder and point to a spot below the edge of the roof. “Listen,” he says gently.
It takes me a little while to hear it and when I do I feel compelled to crawl over to the sound. It’s a ground-thumping whump! It sounds like big sacks of flour are being loaded onto a truck. Doom is already there on the edge looking over with Mouse and Nemesis and I think to myself, “Is this really all there is left of us? Of our neighborhood? Of Mclean High School? Of Mclean?”
Doom looks up at me as I reach the edge of the roof and whispers, “I told you so.”
“Yeah, Doom, it’s your dream come true,” says Nemesis sourly. I peer over to see what has her in such a bad mood, and then I see it.
The dead are stacking themselves like cords of wood, one on top of the other, right next to the side of the building. It’s slow going at first—they’re still thawing out, but soon they’re joined by the Infected from inside the building, the ones who were protected from the elements and probably never fully froze. They started throwing themselves one on top of the other, but the pile of pungency is so high now they have to resort to climbing up the stack before they can lay themselves down and add to its height.
“I’ve still got a lighter in my bag,” suggests Doom. “If we light up the paper in your books and throw it down on them, it will probably at least light their clothes up...”
“…and then they’ll set the whole building on fire,” finishes Mouse in a deadpan voice.
Suddenly, they stop. I don’t know why they’ve stopped. Maybe they heard our plans. They look up expectantly while we look down on them in despair. What are they waiting for?
As if hearing my thoughts, Houston says, “I think they’re waiting to see how we choose to die.”
“What do you mean?” asks Doom.
“Well, they’ve been studying us, right? Right from the very beginning they’ve been studying us. They’re in no hurry to get to us. How much longer can we last now that we’re out of water? I think they’re curious to see how we choose to die.”
“Lucky us, we have so many choices” Nemesis says, defeated. “We could have another temperature drop and finally freeze to death. We could drink the infected water and be free from suffering within seconds, or we could choose the most slow and agonizing option: death by dehydration.”
“Dorothy looked pretty peaceful to me when she died,” I say without thinking. “Just saying.”
“What would your father do in this situation?” Mouse asks Doom.
“He’d probably shoot each one of us in the head to keep us from coming back and then do the same to himself.”
“Sorry I asked.”
“Would you do that to us, Doom, if you had a gun?”
Doom appears to think for a moment and then with finality in his voice replies, “No, I couldn’t do that to you guys. It was hard enough doing something like that to Sarah and the others the first time.”
For some reason this makes us all relax. I don’t know why. It’s not like it makes a difference anymore.
The stacking seems to have suspended itself indefinitely. The strength of our will must fascinate these creatures. How many others did they observe giving up? How many people chose the quicker path to death? How many just lay down and died? Do they place bets on how much we’re willing to suffer to put off the inevitable? My eyes close with the weight of these thoughts.
I don’t know how long we must have sat there that way, close to each other yet lost in our own thoughts, but it must have been hours because when I open my eyes again it’s because I feel the temperature drop. The sun is going down and we will need to put our layers back on if we’re to survive the night.
Except that no one moves. We all know we’re supposed to do something to endure, but we don’t. Houston fixes me with a look as I let out one big sigh.
“So we’ve chosen.”
So we have.