Everyone was saying that this was
the worst winter they could remember. It certainly wasn't the coldest, but in
January alone we'd gotten more snow than the past five years combined. The
snow banks were as high as a man's waist; sometimes they were nearly as high as his chest. This made for
miserable driving, and a
deep-running sensation of dread in any
sensible person. The
snowmobilers were happy, as were the children. It was the first time in years that the winter-folk could run rampant in the desolate
Wisconsin Northwoods.
But
winter-folk are not of right mind by any means. The
children's joy was forgivable, for they
knew no better--but any full-grown adult who was not
miserable, who had not
resigned himself to staying in bed for days at a time or
setting the living room aflame and nursing a stiff drink as the fire spread throughout the house--well, that man was of
highly questionable sanity and by all rights should just build himself an
igloo with a
two-snow-mobile garage or at the very least go live in his
ice shack and
stay the hell away from me.
No, I was a
right-minded individual and could care less for any place buried in three plus feet of snow. And anyway,
the dull ache in my right ankle told me that
the worst was yet to come. I locked myself in my
tiny apartment with a
stack of books that I'd been meaning to get to, innumerable LP's and
mix tapes, an
inherited guitar, packets of
Ramen noodles, cans of vegetable soup and a stockpile of
rye whiskey. Anything that reminded me of the harshness of winter was
thrown out the window, down into the streets to be ran over by
passing cars.
By the time
February came to town, January's lack of below-zero temperatures was made up for in
spades. The first two weeks of
the most miserable month of the year were marked by record lows,
Antarctic windchills that would freeze a man's blood. In a matter of days, the whole of
Northern Wisconsin was transformed into
Victoria Land.
Minnesota was trapped under the
Ross Ice Shelf and hundreds were dying per day from the most brutal cases of
hypothermia and
pneumonia the world had ever known. By the end of it all, a number comparable to the combined populations of
Madison,
Milwaukee, and
Green Bay had caught their death of cold.
I couldn't wait for it all to be over. I was sleeping twelve hours at a time and
never saw the light of day. I had convinced myself that
the end had finally come; that there was no
Gnab Gib--the universe had simply stretched too far and was dying
a slow, painful and lonely death. It was
only a matter of time, anywhere from a few weeks to a few years, but I was certain that
all life on planet Earth would be gone by the end of the decade and that the rest of the universe shared the same fate. The New
Ice Age was upon us. The
Final Ice Age, where
men's hearts would freeze, shattering while trying to pump that last bit of
warmth and life through the body. Even
Hell--if such a dreadful place existed--had frozen over,
Satan forever locked solid in place with an
infinite amount of fear in his eyes. He had
lost the war, but it was no matter.
God had fled the scene, leaving all his creations to
die alone.
This was the type of
madness that I had succumb to, trapped prisoner in my
tiny one-bedroom apartment. I wasn't sure if the rest of humanity still existed or not. For all I knew
Washington had
pressed the button and I was the only person left. Me and the
roaches and whichever pigs hadn't frozen to death, kept company by
shadows burnt into walls. How I wished that I had bothered paying my cable and
phone bills and that I could hear
the warmth of another human voice, for my own had grown weak. If only someone would
knock at my door, pop in for a
quick hello and maybe a
drink. But such things do not happen in the
dead of winter, and such things especially do not happen when
the bomb has been dropped and most of the life on the planet was no more.
So on
the coldest night of the year I worked up the courage to explore the
bitter winter landscape. I put on my
thermals and several layers more, laced up my
boots and set off. I was the greatest of the
Antarctic explorers, armed with a compass and a flask of
Jim Beam. The
streetlights were still operational but the town seemed otherwise dead. Cars and houses looked abandoned.
Storefronts were boarded up. It seemed
my most horrible suspicions had been confirmed. I was lost in the
post-apocalyptic version of a
ghost town with particularly
finite means for survival. And even so, what did it matter? I could raid the stores for canned goods and
liquor, but what was the point?
Surviving means nothing if you're alone, and I was sure there was
no Eve to my Adam.
But alas,
downtown, a light shone through a
familiar window, as bright and beautiful as the
North Star guiding the
wise men to their
savior. I climbed a
creaky set of stairs and at the top I knocked loudly at the door marked
Apartment 2. It was answered promptly by a
drunk-and-getting-drunker friend,
the first human I had seen for weeks. The place felt warm and inviting, and inside I was greeted by a
small group of friends playing
drinking games and listening to
black metal. I was shocked but relieved to find that I was not the only living soul among the
legions of dead. "How many other survivors are there, do you know?" I asked as I fished for a
cigarette. The group laughed, as if I were merely
making some kind of joke, but someone responded, a
black-haired girl with clover eyes, saying that we were the only ones she knew of, that she suspected other
colonies within a day's walk, but these suspicions were
insubstantial and it was up to our little group to take charge of
rebuilding and re-populating, however
futile it might seem. I wanted to be filled in on all the
nasty little details, find out what sparked humanity's last (and shortest) war, how anyone survived ... But there would be
time for that later.
I poured myself a drink.