The Snow

The snow came earlier every year.

Josie opened her mouth and the let the flakes melt gently on her tongue. Eyes closed she felt the warmth of the sun on her face. It wouldn’t last. Soon the flakes would turn icy and fall from the sky so hard they could tear the skin from her face.

She ignored the first shout, savouring the feeling of being outside without her zero-suit. There weren’t really seasons anymore, just a small window in an endless winter, but even that was closing.

“Josie, you must come in now. It’s getting colder.” It was her mother calling. Her voice faint and tinny over the speaker.

Their home was underground where it was still warm.

The seasonal snow had melted so the top of the exit shaft protruded way above the ground. But It wasn’t so long ago that it had been completely covered. A sea of white.

The wind was picking up now. Josie could hear it whistling between the skeletons of the buildings which still survived above ground. Her uncle Clyde had told her there were still people who lived up here all year. She’d laughed at it then, but the idea didn’t seem so funny now.

She pressed the intercom with a gloved thumb. “I’m going to find Robert and Cleo, I’ll come back with them soon.” Josie didn’t wait for the reply. She didn’t like to argue with her mother. Her footprints were soon filled by the falling snow.

Living underground was more difficult for the people who’d known life before it got cold. Josie was 13 and had been born underground, she only knew about the long summer from her mother’s stories. She thought it must have been a sad time, because her mother always cried when she told them.

Josie run as fast as she could through the soft powder snow. Enjoying the almost endless open space. She’d often try to run underground, but could only make a few paces at full speed before she’d come crashing into a wall. Once she’d collided into Uncle Clyde and covered him in his bowl of bean stew.

That was before Uncle Clyde had been turned by the dark. That’s what the older ones called the underground sometimes. You could always tell it was there, lurking behind the eyes. A longing to get out of the tunnels.

In the end it was too much for Uncle Clyde. They said he’d gone mad and stabbed a man over and over in a wild frenzy. He was expelled by the council into the cold. Josie had watched as they dragged him outside without a zero-suit. He’d stared right at her with eyes like glass, it was almost as if they were frozen.

The broken buildings loomed above her. Long, sharp icicles hanging down like teeth from the shattered remains of the city. Once the cold had descended, it hadn’t taken long for the ice to take root in the concrete walls and iron structures, forcing them to split apart and crumble.

No one went into the city anymore, even with a zero-suit on. It was full of hidden dangers, cracks deep in the ground that could swallow you up. And in the warmer months, the risk of falling icicles making a skewer of you.

Josie ran to the edge of the snow field, as close as she’d ever been to the city. She stopped so her feet were touching the edge of the shadow. It had always fascinated her, to think so many people had lived in the city, a million, two million. The numbers were unthinkable now there were so few living underground. She knew most of them by name.

The blood was stark against the white. Just a drop on the ground. Josie stared at it, put her hand to her nose. Sometimes being above ground could cause her a nosebleed. But her hand came away clean. She saw the second drop further away, larger than the first.

Josie’s heart began to beat a little faster at the sight of the blood, a trail leading towards the city. Sometimes small circles of red, other times it was streaked in the snow, thin lines like the scratches on her mother’s arms after a bad day. ‘We’re not supposed to live like this,’ she’d often hear her say.