Before the Warmth Fades

This story contains mature themes, including emotional distress and survival-related hardship.

The snowfall thickened, each flake layering over the dark, muddy earth until the world outside became a single, blinding sheet of white. It looked like a blank page waiting for a story he no longer believed in.

From inside the cabin, he watched it accumulate. He drank the last of his coffee, the last warmth, the last reminder of the life that had existed before everything turned feral.

At the edge of his vision, beneath the rising snowdrift, lay the shallow hump of his wife’s grave. Another hour and it would vanish into the white desert. He had buried her only a month ago, when the madness first reached them.

She had panicked. Panic had killed her. Not the looter. He didn’t blame the looter. He blamed her.

He rose slowly. For the first time, the cold slipped through the cracks in the cabin wall, touching him like a warning. The fire had burned out. Without it, the small structure belonged again to the indifferent wild. Starting a new fire would only shout into the night: Here. Warmth. Safety. Food.

But there was no safety. And the food — what little remained — was not enough to share.

Survival, he’d learned, meant staying cold, hungry, alone. The age of plenty was over.

***

He sat alone in the comfortable chair and turned another page of his book. Without thinking, his fingers brushed the armrest. It belonged to her. She left me.

The thought fell like a stone into deep water. His posture collapsed, sinking back into the familiar abyss of grief. He tried to picture her, her face, her smile, but the details slipped further away each day. The version he remembered was not the one he buried. It was her younger face, from gentler times, and even that was fading.

A single tear, one of the few his body still seemed capable of producing, slid down his cheek and stayed there.

Then he heard it. Footsteps in the snow outside. He froze. More followed. Two voices, high-pitched, uncertain. Children.

His eyes shifted to the table, where the shotgun lay. His mind tugged at him, tearing itself in two.

They’re children, one part screamed.

They will make noise. They will eat your food, the other whispered, cold and logical.

The voices outside came closer. He stayed seated, unable to move. If he scared them away, they might tell others about the cabin. If he let them in, he would doom all three of them by spring.

There was a third option. The only one that made sense.

The arguing voices inside his skull rose until the pain was unbearable.

He nodded. He knew.

With a steady, resigned certainty, he took the gun, placed it in his mouth, and pulled the trigger.

***

Two children trudged across the white fields, too tired to run, too cold to care.

The forest behind them still looked haunted.

A distant howl rolled across the snow.

The sound vibrated through their bones, settling there like a warning. Wolves. The same wolves that had torn through the camp, what was left of it. They could still see the red eyes, the blood-slick fur, the dripping fangs. The screaming.

That had been this morning.

They had stopped crying hours ago. Maybe the tears had run out. Maybe they’d frozen. The cold had sunk so deeply it no longer felt sharp. It wrapped around them like a heavy blanket, dull and almost comforting.

They walked on, sinking deeper into the snow. Each step slower. Each breath thinner.

They were getting close to the point where cold began to feel warm. Without ever learning the word for it, they somehow knew that was not good.

The smaller one, a girl, hardly six, lifted a trembling hand and pointed. In the distance, a thin thread of smoke curled into the sky. A promise of warmth. Safety. Maybe even food.

The boy, a bit older around nine a full head taller, nodded. They changed direction, feet dragging toward the smoke. Hope made them walk a little faster.

And somehow, as hope returned,

they felt a little colder.

***

As the snow fell heavier, a cabin slowly formed out of the white haze. The wood was still visible beneath an ever-thickening layer of snow, the brown logs looking almost warm. They imagined it smelled like the drink their parents had every morning — back when mornings still existed, before the madness.

In the camp, there had never been enough. Every bite of food, every second of warmth, had been a fight. Especially between their parents. Their parents had never been friends; the wolves hadn’t changed that. They had only ended it. Play had always been something to postpone. Something for later. Later never came.

Now the children struggled just to keep one foot stepping in front of the other. The boy had already fallen twice, soaking his coat and pants with cold powder that turned to ice against his skin. Each fall made him slower. Each step harder than the one before.

They could not remember when the tiredness began, only that now it was almost unbearable. Their legs trembled. Their vision blurred. A light sleep was all they wanted, the kind that felt like sinking into warm water.

If only they could sleep in the cabin.

Just for a moment.

Just for a little warmth.

***

“Hello?” the boy tried, pressing his face toward the frosted window.

His voice was hoarse, thin, barely more than a whisper swallowed by the wind.

“Please…”

The word drifted out of him as if it cost something.

“We’re so c-cold,” the girl squeaked.

If someone weren’t listening closely, it would have sounded more like a small bird chirping than a plea for help.

A few slow, stumbling steps later, they reached the door.

They leaned against it, too weak to knock.

“Please… so cold…”

The boy’s legs buckled, and he fell to his knees, no longer able to stand.

The cold wasn’t hurting anymore.

It had slipped past pain into something softer, warmer.

He felt warm.

Warm and impossibly tired.

The girl tried to pull him upright, but her grip slipped, and she toppled beside him, dragged down onto the hard, frozen ground.

Her small hands pawed uselessly at his coat.

Her breaths came out as faint white wisps, fading quickly in the air.

They lay there, shoulder to shoulder, pressed against the cabin door, too exhausted even to cry.

Too cold to feel afraid.

Just waiting for someone — anyone — to open.

***

Bang.

Birds burst from the trees around the cabin, wings beating the silence apart.

A sheet of snow slid from the roof and crashed onto the ground, erasing the small rising hump that had once marked a grave.

It drifted over the two children as well — the boy and the girl who lay slumped against the door, looking as if they had simply fallen asleep there.

The snow kept falling.

All day it fell, soft and steady, burying their shapes beneath its calm white weight.

From the cabin window, the landscape looked serene.

The whiteness brushed away all misery, all footprints, all cries for help.

It buried the smell of smoke, the traces of struggle, the last tremors of a winter that had never forgiven anyone.

Spring would come eventually.

But not for them.