Chapter 15 TESNI
FIFTEEN
TESNI
I never planned on being here in the dead of winter. The longest, most brutal trip that I can’t escape.
Now, Canada’s harsh winter is my prison.
The frost of the winds is lashing at my face, and fuck if it doesn’t hurt.
I feel every strike, a whip to raw cheeks.
My nose trickles, and each time I lift the sleeve of my parka and wipe, the fabric is damp, and it just smears the snot over my raw, flaky skin.
The insulated hood is pulled over my head, the drawstrings tugged tight, but a fraction of my face is still exposed to the deep winter winds—and it’s the fucking worst.
I have no choice but to endure it.
We have no choice but to suffer it.
The soles of my snowboots crunch on the snowy highway with the others; the crunching of a dozen bootsteps pressing down on snow.
Silence is preferred in the blackout.
But it’s hard to be quiet when the roads have snow inches deep, and we’re forced to move onwards.
Since the world has ended, there are no local governments to battle the elements. Snow is thick in this city, no plowing, no salting, no gritting.
Snow is untouched here. Wild.
It drifts down the cold air and settles over the road, makes hills of abandoned cars. But after these harsh months, it’s starting to ease. I feel that in the steps that I follow around the nose of a car, buried on the highway.
The further north we go, the worse the winter should be. That’s why we travelled down to the west coast of the US, waited out the bulk of the cold season down there, before we routed back up across the border, and found our way further inland.
If I had it my way, we would have chased the heat through the darkness, gone down south to hotter places, like Mexico.
Instead, we’re glued to the west of the North American continent, assaulted by the freezing temperatures of Canada’s winter.
Even gloved, my hand that’s gripped firm around the rope lassoed between the whole group, is raw.
If we had come just a month earlier, the snow would have been up to our knees—and there would be no survival, not in these dark ages, not for us.
This harsh winter brings not just rain and winds, but snow and ice, so it’s best to stick to main roads and highways when we can.
If we venture off too far, too remote, the winter is worse, because all of a sudden, you’re walking on a frozen lake in the dark—and the ice might break.
It’s possible that happened to someone from our group.
In the time we spent moving around California and Nevada, we picked up people along the way, but we have lost a total of four on the journey back up to British Columbia.
I think we just lost them.
The missing people from our group maybe let go of the rope unspooled between us to tie a shoelace or pick up a dropped hat, and that was it, or they got turned around, or passed out from the exhaustion and couldn’t call out for us to stop—
And that’s how easy it is.
Gone.
Into the darkness, forever.
Our group is down to twelve now.
And all of us grip the rope so tightly that, under the protection of our winter gloves, all our knuckles must be blotchy and white with the pressure.
No one dares slip away from the rope as we hike the snowy highway to the city ahead.
At the rear of the line, I wash the gleam of my torchlight over the sign arching over the roads.
‘KELOWNA’
One of those cities that’s really more of a large town, whose population barely inched over 100,000 pre-blackout, and there’s so much land that it sprawls out into a labyrinth of snow-packed streets.
Perfect for us.
It’s the kind of place we carefully pick out on our maps and compare to the travel books we have scoured along the way.
Turns out, libraries are pretty easy to break into, and they make for good safehouses. It’s easy to burn time with a book or two while waiting on others in the group returning.
But I don’t read anything new. There are no new books in my backpack.
Something about the end, the apocalypse, the blackout, the fae, and the dangers of other people, something about all of that has me reading familiar stories.
There is safety in nostalgia.
But I can only afford to have two books at a time weighing down my backpack.
The straps still dig into my shoulders, a constant ache that, no matter how many times I shift and readjust the straps, never eases.
A bud of relief blooms in my tight chest as we pass the city sign and, ahead, the torchlights stretch over the end of the highway.
Almost there.
The breath fogs at my face, but I stare through it to the thick blackness edging into our torchlight, as if desperately trying to take over, swallow it whole, and plunge us into darkness again.
Something about the blackout in a moment like this, with strong, hefty torches blasting light into it, seems monstrous—like it’s sentient in a way, and fights to creep into the light, invade it, but can’t.
And these torches are top grade.
Not the one strapped to the barrel of my shotgun. No, this one is handheld, one for me at the back of the line, and one for Gary at the front.
We aim, and light blasts through the blackout and illuminates the tall buildings that border the road spilling out from the highway. We don’t see past the buildings on the street—but we see enough.
Mounds of snow.
That’s the city in this thick winter. Buildings, roads, trees, parks, all buried in dense snow.
Behind me, I hear the imitation of horse clopping made by a tongue smacking off the roof of a mouth.
A newer addition to our code.
Simple, it means prepare.
So we do.
I flick my light off at the back of the line just as another at the front switches on.
Now, Carlos and Gary illuminate the way.
A hand reaches out from behind me and settles on my shoulder. It replaces the rope trapped between my palm that I let go of so I can fix the torch to my belt. That hand on my shoulder keeps me in place, with the group, not a step off-track, before I steal the rope back into my gloved grip.
The road spears through the city.
Though the buildings are buried in snow, it’s clear that a dark fae unit has already moved through one half of Kelowna.
On our left, buildings are gone, now rubble.
Snow dusts over the debris.
Half the city is gone.
It took us too long to get here. The city was meant to be untouched by the time we reached it.
Bee’s thoughts must mirror mine, since her boots dig into the ground and, hand on the rope, she tugs once, firm.
Stop.
Stillness washes over us.
Heads turn to face Bee in the darkness, a rustle of parkas and snowjackets, before Gary’s torchlight lands on her.
I blink at the reveal the rawness on her cold-burnt cheeks, the chapped lips that utter misty breaths. The rest of her is hidden in the drawn hood.
“I’ll scout the south of the city,” Bee decides, and with her being our fearless leader, there is no argument, not even as my face hardens. “Carlos, get everyone to the safehouse. Gary, you’re with me.”
The reluctance of meeting my hard stare comes in the way she looks anywhere but me.
I hate when we separate.
I hate it more that I know we must sometimes part.
I hate most of all that I can’t go with her.
That’s why she avoids my unflinching stare. If she meets it, she’ll do that thing she does, where she sighs and her face softens in a blend of plea and pity, and she’ll say what she always does.
‘You can’t keep up.’
I loathe most of all that it’s true.
The black plague has done some damage to my lungs. So no, I can’t keep up.
If Bee has to run, I can only match her pace for a short burst before my lungs are searing and my head is dizzy.
If Bee has to hide, the coughs might start—and betray us to any threat nearby.
I’m a liability out here.
So she goes with Gary, the gruff sort of man in his 50s, small town vibes. He’s not so bad.
No one in our group is ‘bad’.
We make sure to stalk people for a while, watch them, study them, before we invite them in.
Basic apocalyptic safety policy.
Carlos watches both Bee and Gary head down a road that forks off from this one. His jaw is tight, displeased, and he hesitates too long.
I tug the rope thrice.
Go.
In answer, he gives a scoff-huff hybrid before he turns his cheek to the torchlight bobbing deeper into the darkness down the other road.
Carlos leads us deeper into the city, east-bound.
The highway has turned into a four-lane main road, running down the centre of the city. We walk it a while, bordered by scorched remains on the northside.
The safehouse is in the untouched east end, a hospital we picked out on the map before we even left the last town to come here.
It’s the better part of an hour before we reach it, a journey lengthened by unrelenting winds and thick snow. The reprieve of shoving through the push doors is slight, an escape from the battering winds only—but it’s just as cold inside.
The chill follows us all the way to the ICU on the top floor.
We have been banded together for long enough that no one needs to say what they are doing or bark an order, because we all know now.
It’s ingrained in us.
Emily goes with the twins to the patient rooms to loot the mattresses, then drag them behind the nurse station.
That’s where we rest. Together, in one huge sleeping area behind the desk, because all of those stations are the same in every hospital.
Each has at least two exit points, and a desk low enough that we can shoot over it if we need to.
We also have cover from the entrance doors—but are close enough to the stairwells for an easy escape.
I don’t help set up our nest.
Just moments after arriving in the ICU, I leave with Aaliyah for the stairwell and we search for the cafeteria. We stop to check the maps on the walls a couple of times before we find it.
Hospitals are always such fucking labyrinths.
I don’t expect to find a lot in the cafeteria, but it’s always worth a shot.
The fridges and freezers are left untouched as we rummage through the cupboards.
There isn’t much.