Chapter Eighty-Two
At first, Emme felt as though she was in a washing machine. Tumbling in a cold cycle as her body was caught up in the crashing cacophony of snow, carrying her limbs like a Catherine wheel. Her first thoughts were confused.
What the hell is going on?
Then realisation.
This is actually happening.
I’m dying.
She thought about Cat. She tried to call for her, but no words came out.
Emme’s voice was muffled, as if someone had stuffed a heavy cloth in her mouth.
She didn’t know if her eyes were open or closed, there was a darkness enveloping her that was also piercingly bright; she felt a searing heat that was also freezing cold.
Her body felt as if the weight of a thousand trucks had rammed her into a pillow of freezing cotton.
The cartwheeling came to an abrupt halt with a feeling that she was being slammed into something sharp, alongside a million little pieces of debris.
Then everything went dark. An eerie silence reigned, while Emme realised she was slipping away.
Emme opened her eyes, not sure whether seconds, minutes or hours had passed. It couldn’t be hours. She remembered Cat telling her how humans only lasted fifteen minutes under the snow, before they died of suffocation or hypothermia.
Perhaps I’m already dead, Emme thought, although she could hear muffled, muted screams in a distant realm.
The sound of a helicopter. Sounds which suggested movement.
Sounds which suggested life. She tried to look around her but was surrounded by white concrete, then she realised, she could be so many metres deep.
This was really happening. All her optimism from just moments ago, the empowering soaring flying, had been crushed. This was the end.
She thought about her mother, father, sister, and niece and nephew as a chilling comfort washed over her. ‘It’s OK,’ she told herself, as if she were reassuring Zara and Zack. Comforting them so they might sense she was at peace.
‘It’s OK.’
Her breathing became more laboured, the cold cloth expanding in her mouth. She tried to punch the snow around her but the weight of it pinned her arms, and she was frozen in her freefall, frozen in time.
‘It’s OK,’ she told herself, as she felt herself slipping away.