Wendigo Island (ONC2024)

Entry 17: Changing Seasons

(Several pages are entirely illegible, as if written with Marie's non dominant hand. The handwriting gets better slowly. Thankfully, she treats these pages as practice and starts where she last left off. She had been through a lot up until now, but I think this is where Marie finally lost her mind. I would not recommend reading further unless you have a strong stomach. Draco.)

Marie/Entry 17

There's nothing in this world like a blizzard. The closest comparison I can make is to that moment when you stretch and your vision blurs, you get all warm and dizzy from the blood rush. A blizzard is like that, but the opposite. There's no warmth, only cold, and no darkness, only white fuzz raging around.

Blain fell first.

He was dead before he hit the snow. Blood loss. It took everything to keep pushing forward, so we hadn't even noticed the arrow sticking out of his gut. I'm not sure he even noticed.

The blizzard stopped raging once he died. I feel it only existed to kill him in the first place. Some divine fuck you to remind us that even the perfect Army Ranger was no match for mother natures creulity.

Now, the snow comes down in slow flakes, as if it's raining miniature sugar cookies. Except they don't taste like sugar cookies, only frozen refreshment biting softly into your face. Then, stinging like bees when the cold saps your strength fully. Then nothing but a vague wetness when the nerves go numb.

The snow covers the ground in a fluffy white blanket that yearns to be snuggled into. This deception is easy to avoid almost anywhere else, but here? Amongst the howling and the hunger, a frozen nap seems like a grand idea. An idea that overtook us.

I fell soon after Blain died. Mute might've made it further, but he stumbled over me. We wound up cuddling for warmth.

When I woke up, his dark skin had turned Crayola yellow, and his arms were stuck to mine with ice. I peeled them off and brought myself to my knees. Thinking becomes difficult when a blizzard blots out the world, so I sat there with a blank mind and a spinning sky.

Despite the tremors, I managed to pull Mute's clothes off and put them over mine, and then I found Blain. Only a small part of his face remained uncovered in snow. I brushed it away and pulled him to a sit with much struggle.

That was when it all hit me. Looking into his lifeless eyes, seeing the blood stain in the snow. I pryed his stone knife out of the ice cube covering his hand and used it to carve open his stomach. His guts came pouring out.

His warm, warm guts.

I plunged my hands in first and worked the fingers until they could feel again. Only one hand moved, though, and the color never quite went away. There were small streaks of purple and yellow where my skin had frozen to death.

I shoved my pockets and boots full of him, and I filled Mute's pockets, and I peeled off Blain's jacket and started to fill his pockets, but his pockets were already full of sticks and leaves.

Dry sticks and leaves!

I ripped out Blain's lungs and heart and did the same with Mute's. The same way we had done Karla's. I could only carry so much of the men with me.