ON YOUR LAST BREATH | Mike Schmidt ✔️

chapter ten .. never cold again

CHAPTER TEN —    " never cold again "

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          SNOW HAD BARELY DRIZZLED overnight, contouring the streets, the roofs of houses and the skeletons of trees and gardens with white. Though the temperatures dipped with no sign of wishing to melt this November precursor to a cold winter, there was no ice on the ground just yet and those little paintings of frost on the sidewalk were there just to let the few drivers know the time of the year to scratch windshields had come.

Since an exceeded caffeine intake was too much of a gamble for Haley, this cold air was, for the first time in a really long while, a good thing — it kept her awake.

There had been no sleep in her schedule since that night at her house and since it was unbearably difficult for her to calculate exactly how many hours have passed since her last sleep, Haley was firmly convinced however many hours those had been, they were one too many to not be undoubtedly grateful the cold nipped needles at her skin until her red cheeks and nose were numbed into an overall lack of sensation. Not even her gloved hands escaped the chills, but at the very least, she could rest assured staying in motion would keep her legs from freezing.

Her roller-skates helped her slide down the quiet street that early afternoon unfelt, disturbing no one in a neighborhood paralyzed by fear over the news that have been gradually getting worse since the Monday of their arrival.

Though sliding ensured Haley would move fast without also burning too much of her oxygen at once, it was still difficult enough to be out and about without her oxygen tank tubed to her nose and with a heavy weight in her backpack. That very naked sensation of carrying three of those things her lungs needed but not also using any of them, was an open-wound sort of vulnerability that demanded of her to keep at least her inhaler right at her side, within reach for a quick use.

The quietness of the street only grew once the neighborhoods were exchanged for a view of expanding forests to her right and a large lake to the left, staring her back like an old friend. Her skin remembered the chill of those waters and peppered her arms whole with goosebumps in order to tell her she was getting close to the swimming center. The building itself stood to greet her as some sort of effigy of the past that cannot decide if it wants to persist a role in the present or allow itself to fade into memory just yet. It looked old and new, abandoned and alive, a stark paradox of worn out walls and brand new windows, existing to challenge the onlooker on a bet about just how old the structure was.

Most of the town buildings used to be something else before and though Haley has never heard anything about the swimming center having been built on the foundation of another construction, she knew for a fact, as she slowed down to a stop in the parking lot, that whatever she was looking at was no longer what it had been before. The place she loved most as an innocent child was gone. The place of horror in her memory was an untrustworthy image too, because it had made for so long out of those walls a monster in the mouth of which she was aware she walked each time she had to pick Abby up.

Right then however, Haley decided that she was looking at no monster, but instead at the face of a stranger — at someone she used to know, but no longer recognized.

It was, after all, much easier to kill a stranger.

Not yet approaching the front door, waiting for her propped open on a stone moved between the sliding glass and its frame, Haley reached back to the right side of her backpack and pulled off her walkie-talkie, reckoning she was most likely well within range already for the first check in.