Mount Monozero, or, Cassandra in the Mountains

          Our parents took us into the mountains in November. My sisters—Alda, the older, and Ulsa, the younger—had no interest in hiking, in climbing mountains, in watching strange animals, or even stranger insects and spiders, in eating berries and nuts, in becoming one with Mother Nature’s primal heart, or in camping for any period of time. As the only son I had gone with my father on numerous excursions into the hills not far from our town, and had roughed it with him for up to four and five nights at a time. Father taught me to build lean-tos and swamp beds and debris huts from the barest of materials, had shown me how to make a quick but sustainable fire, how to hunt with only a knife, and how to determine the toxicity of obscure plants. My survival skills were fine, better than others I knew my age, but they were not sufficient for our expedition into the mountains that winter.

          “As your body gets colder,” said Father, while we hiked upward against chilling wind and ankle-deep snow on our first day, “you get weak, and you get distracted, you can’t think of anything but warming up. That makes you careless. You become desperate for warmth, see. Coldness destroys your will to do what needs to be done. You get chills, you get tired, you lose sight of what’s important, and before you know it you’re dead.”

          No one said anything. We were cold and tired. Coldness had destroyed our will to listen. It was three hours into the hike and we knew it would get worse. Ulsa complained about the wind.

          “Wind chill is one of the greatest environmental threats you’ll face in Nature’s court,” said Father. “If it’s warm or temperate, like in the jungle, you need worry only about food, water, and shelter to survive. Maybe self defense. In temperatures like this,” and he held out his arms as if to direct our eyes to the white mountains around us, the gray skies, the dying plants, the frozen earth, “you have the added worry of protecting yourself from the elements. When the wind’s hard it feels colder, and your body reacts as if it really were colder.” He looked at the thermometer he kept on his belt. “It’s one degree Fahrenheit right now. Wind’s awful strong, right? You get winds like this, what I guess is ten miles an hour, and your wind chill is…” He muttered to himself for a moment. “Minus fifteen degrees. Cold, huh? Stay covered all over. D’you know you can lose up to fifty percent of your body heat through your head?! Keep it covered. Ulsa! Put your hood back on!”

          We were dressed for the weather, each of us in a thick jacket, layer upon layer of shirts, sweaters, pants, long underwear, gloves, fat socks, and heavy boots. Father carried a revolver and a knife at his belt and rolled up tent supplies on his back. Mother carried cookware and packages of food, and my sisters and I carried fire starters, sleeping gear, toilet paper, medical supplies, and other assorted necessities. The plan was to spend four nights in the mountains, far away from civilization, far away from the resources we’d come to rely on, far away from the technological ease and comfort our father said made us feeble prey to the wild. He planned to teach us what he knew about survival. And he knew everything.

          “Anywhere you’re low on body fat is a place you’re gonna lose heat,” he said. He pulled aside a glove to show us his hand, and also pointed to his neck. “Keep these areas covered. Keep the face covered, especially. And that wind blowing in your eyes and mouth and nose is gonna get your sinuses draining, it’ll move your tears, and you’ll leak out all the fluids you need to stay alive.”

          “Disgusting,” said Alda, short of breath.

Mother laughed. “And yet you won’t wear a scarf,” her voice muffled through a scarf of her own.

Normally Father would make a joke. But the woods brought him to another place. Not just in body, but in mind and spirit. He was an animal out here, a focused and determined animal, with the sole purpose of teaching survival through demonstration. Having foreseen some kind of technological and societal collapse in the near future, Father had for almost a year warned us of an impending apocalypse befalling humanity. He said there were signs all over the place, and documented them through the months. Pulling items from world news, economics, technological news, scientific reports, even history itself, questionable documents from questionable sources, and select bits from local news, he had pieced together a vision of doom. But that was of no interest to me or my sisters.

We hiked past a frozen creek and he told us of the dangers of water in freezing temperatures.

“It’s important to keep dry. Even sweat can be a threat! We’re wearing water repellant outer layers, so we’re equipped against snow or sleet. See a stream like this,” and he pointed to the unmoving ice that stretched alongside our path, down the mountain, “and you think, ‘Finally! Here’s water!’ But you don’t just attack the ice and start drinking. That’ll kill you.”

Mother had thought Father schizophrenic after he introduced her to his strange visions of the end. After weeks of his becoming more and more serious about the fall of mankind she took him to a psychiatrist for examinations. He met with the doctor three separate times, and each meeting lasted hours.

          “It’s a delicate procedure we’ll get to when the time comes,” Father said. “Water’s not scarce when you’ve got snow. Gotta heat it up. You drink that water cold and it’ll dehydrate you. That’s the opposite of what you want. And be aware of your own body heat, too. Stay warm, but don’t get too hot and start sweating. To keep from sweating and overheating, just remove a layer when need be.” He took off his coat and removed his sweater. After stuffing it in his backpack he put his coat back on and warned us to do the same when we had to.

          He went on like this for the entire hike. He didn’t normally talk so tirelessly, but like I said, the wilderness makes him different. It excites him. We climbed over a massive fallen tree in our way. Mother helped Ulsa over, who was too tired and small to do it alone.

          “Dear,” said Mother, after we defeated the tree, “we really ought to rest.”

          “Right, Dear, right,” Father said.

          The doctor had determined Father to be mentally fit in just about every way, aside from what he perceived to be a mild obsessive compulsive disorder. But paranoid schizophrenia was out of the question. This was happy news to everyone. Father wasn’t surprised, and in the weeks that followed he only advanced his theory of the end with more detail and careful observation, scribbling in his books, cutting articles out of the paper and magazines he’d stolen from neighbors’ mailboxes, or browsing distant nooks of the internet in late hours of the night. He saw it coming like a slow dark cloud over the mountains, rumbling and flickering with lightning. You might be tempted to say his predictions were akin to predicting where that lightning would strike, but it wasn’t like that. He’d decided early on the lightning was going to strike everywhere. It was only a matter of how soon, and what to expect in the aftermath. He told Mother in privacy the things he was learning, though I can’t say my sisters or I had enough interest at the time to ask either of them for explanations.

          We set up a small camp in a level clearing halfway up the mountain. None of us knew where we were going except Father, and it was possible even he didn’t have a place in mind. The purpose was to rip us away from our comforts, strip us of our simple lives, and throw us headfirst into wild survival so that we’d be ready when his inevitable apocalypse came. Preparation was key, but planning a destination might have been to miss the point. As Father and I set up the tent, Mother and Alda made a lunch of potatoes and chili, while Ulsa collected branches for a fire.

          We were more than forty miles from civilization. Our hometown lied two hundred miles to the southeast. We had left before the sun came up, and after passing through the sparsely populated countryside of the hills we hit a stretch of highway that took us further and further into barren lands, past uninhabited voids of rolling landscape. The green and blue slowly faded to white and gray, until we reached the edge of the mountains and forest where Father said every danger posed by nature existed in some form. The back roads turned into dirt roads, and the dirt roads turned into bumpy paths not intended for cars, until eventually we parked in a dead field. The walk to the mountains would have only taken an hour if Father hadn’t stopped us at a frozen lake to show us how ice fishing is done. Almost five hours after starting our hike we had a campsite.

          Father spent a big part of the afternoon telling us about fires, or as he called it, the Principles of Firecraft. The “fire triangle”, meaning the correct ratio of air, heat, and fuel, was of capital importance in the construction of a proper flame. Fire starting tools were in our bags, but Father wouldn’t let us use them. Not until we could make a fire with wood and rocks. Although I was experienced building fires, it was an hour and a half before my sisters and I had a small flame going, and it lived for mere seconds. By sundown we managed to build a tiny inferno of glowing coals and crackling chemical changes, which slowly died away. Father made a fire that grew to a miniature blaze in less than a minute after our efforts were spent. With night came the howls of wolves, the distant calls of birds, and the eerie wind that never let up. But heavy sleeping bags and the fire kept us warm.

          Day two was worse than the first, because it started in the cold discomfort of sweat-soaked sleeping bags and a wet tent. There’s another reason it was worse, which will shortly be evident. After breakfast we took down our camp and hiked further up the mountain. By lunch we had traveled an estimated ten miles, around to the far west side of the ridge, to a great vista dominated by mountaintops and low clouds.

          “This almost makes it worth it,” said Alda. “Almost.” The breeze was strong, throwing her breath faraway as she spoke.

          “That’s the Peak of the Woodcutter,” said Father, pointing to the mountaintop farthest north. “Fourteen thousand odd feet high. Named for the Indian lumberjacks who died in a forest fire at its base. It’s said one of the Indians fell off the top of the mountain and landed right in the woods where the fire started. It happened only minutes before the fire, so some say his body itself became the fire that consumed the woods.”

          Alda interrupted with something about how Indians should be referred to as Native Americans, but Father continued unhindered.

          “And that’s the eighteen thousand foot Big Devil,” he said, pointing to the mountain directly next to the Peak of the Woodcutter. “Frost giants were thought to live there for centuries. Really, in all the mountains. But that one especially, because of its caves. Hyperborean gods and other kinds of entities were considered a thing of distant folklore, but those who came here from the Scandinavian lands believed in trolls and giants and gods. Your uncle Skit knew a guy who descended from those Nords and Swedes, and he said the whole family was serious about frost giants. They had rituals to keep the giants out of their settlements.”

           “Do those settlements still exist?” I asked. This was the first interesting information Father had shared the whole day, since most of the morning he spent explaining why we couldn’t just eat snow to quench our thirst, paired with a small demonstration of how to understand the local ecosystem just by taking apart the poop of wild animals.

          “No. Of course not. Skit went with his friend to the ruins of an old settlement where the guy’s ancestors first lived. Nothing but rotting foundations of wood and stone remain, but he said the people left behind relics. And a few dwellings might still be intact.” Loosening the hood from around his head, Father pointed to another mountain and identified it as Mount Monozero, saying it was our destination.

          “Why that one?” asked Ulsa. “I like Big Devil! ‘Cause it has caves.”

          “We’ll see caves, honey,” said Father. “Believe me.”

          We ate lunch on the mountainside overlooking those endless peaks. Mother told us a story about her first camping trip with our father, the battles he had with forest rangers, the quickness with which he could build a workable raft, his thoughtfulness when climbing a cliff with a friend, his attention to detail in every conceivable way. I shared stories of my own, about Father’s naked bathing in rivers, about the time he caught a salmon the same way bears catch them, about his making us camp in a tree when there were three fire-ant colonies in the vicinity. He decided it was time we get moving again.

          We descended back to the treeline before moving up the flank of Mount Monozero, a mountain almost twenty thousand feet high at its peak. The wind hadn’t died down. We came to a narrow climb, and father took out his binoculars to look toward the ridge at the top, where the mountain nudged against others. He was quiet. He put them away and we continued. Only a little further up the climb he looked through his binoculars again.

          “I want to look!” said Ulsa, jumping and reaching for the binoculars. He handed them to her, and pointed toward the ridge. “I don’t see it,” she said.

          “There’s a fracture,” he said.

          “A fracture?” said Mother, coming up behind us. “In the ice?”

          “In the snow, yeah. Along the ridge. Another on the side. We’ll go another way.”

          Ulsa returned his binoculars, and said, “Will we find any caves the other way?”

          “We might,” he said. He sounded alert. “This way, guys” He guided us back the way we came, and along another route, away from the narrow climb we’d been struggling with. He was unusually quiet, with no words of wisdom on survival or the wilderness, or the snow or ice or mountains or beasts of the wild. He was intent on getting us away from whatever he saw in the binoculars. Our path cut through rocks and the naked trunks of trees too high for leaves. He looked around as we moved, his eyes darting every way along our path, sensitive to any change in conditions; conditions of which only he was aware.

          Shortly we came to a large open area on the side of the mountain, relatively flat and not steep, with a good view of what lie ahead and above. We stopped so Alda and Mother could go to the bathroom, though that word loses all meaning on a mountain. The “bathroom” was a large cairn made by some long ago travelers who had passed through the same point. The stones were piled high, twenty feet or more, more than ten feet wide at its base, held together with a sort of clay. What had perhaps once been a marker for a monument, or a place of ancient ritual, or merely an exercise in wilderness carpentry was now reduced to something practical; a toilet.

          “We’re making good time,” said Father, looking at the fuzzy light of the sun through the clouds.

          “Are we gonna see caves?” asked Ulsa.

          “Maybe, honey.”

          I started to think the day, and maybe the whole trip, was going against Father’s plans. The point was to learn survival, but all we’d been doing was hiking, climbing mountain faces, trudging through snow, and setting up camp. There had been no hunting, no building, no activity important to the prolonging of life in dire conditions. We were experiencing very little of what Father intended for us. I wanted to ask him about this, but that chance never came.

          As soon as Alda and Mother returned from the cairn toilet, a hawk, or a condor, or some large bird my father didn’t have time to identify through his binoculars let out an impressive caw in the sky, as it flew low over Mount Monozero. Father looked as though his heart stopped. The bird repeated its heavenly mockery several times and seemed to disappear over the ridge as a rumble became audible.

          “Quiet!” yelled Father. Alda and Mother stopped mid-sentence. Ulsa looked at me, afraid of the tone of Father’s voice.

          The rumble grew louder. We could feel the earth itself shake below our feet.

          Father pointed toward the top of the mountain, and we all saw it. Great white clouds seemed to burst out the side of the rock, growing and growing, descending the face, engulfing everything around them.

          “Move! Go!” he shouted, sprinting away down the mountain. He picked up Ulsa as he ran past me, and ordered us to follow.

          Alda and I were close behind. As I looked back to Mother I saw the massive white cloud grow larger from the mountain. An avalanche. It was impossible to judge its size or is speed or its severity from this distance, but the noise was a steady grinding alert, a heavy rumble we felt. We were right on Father’s heels.

          “The cairn!” shouted Mother. “The cairn!”

          Father glanced at it, then looked forward. There was nothing below us on the mountain. No shelter, no place to hide, just a long descent in the snow. The avalanche was upon us. Father sprinted toward the cairn, and tripped, planting Ulsa and himself hard in the snow.

          “Take your sister!” he yelled.

          I grabbed Ulsa, and Alda and Mother stopped to help Father to his feet.

          “Can you run?” I asked Ulsa, suddenly aware I was too weak to carry her all the way.

          She jumped out of my arms and we ran toward the cairn.

          I looked back at the avalanche. It appeared many times its original size, still growing. Its expanding white clouds were closer, storming down the mountain like a slow motion explosion. I saw Mother and Alda holding Father between them, slowly trampling through the snow toward us.

          “Faster, much faster!” I yelled. I ran to them, told my mother and sister to go ahead, while slinging Father’s arm over my shoulders.

          He had been yelling at them, and now he yelled at me. “Drop me!”

          I saw Ulsa and Alda climbing the cairn, and Mother waiting at its base for my father and me. We reached it as the avalanche filled our view above. It was only hundreds of feet away.

          Mother and I helped Father up the cairn. Ulsa and Alda were toward the top, and soon there was nothing but a wall of white upon us.

         “Go!” I yelled, shoving Father up the side, as Mother pulled from the top. When he was up he reached down and grabbed my arm, and that’s when the wall of white hit, pulverizing everything in its path.

         

          In the weeks leading up to our trip Father had become more and more afraid of something. His visions of the end had no religious undertones, and if the psychiatrist was right, schizophrenia didn’t play a role. Mother spent hours talking to him in the bedroom away from my sisters and me, but it was evident their conversations weren’t related to marriage or family or money or personal issues. This wasn’t the prelude to a divorce, it was something else, something outside the home. When they came out of their room they always seemed fine. Father would play with Ulsa, Mother and Alda would have an ordinary conversation, and there was no visible strife between our parents. It had all the characteristics of a conspiracy theory, except for one thing. Father never made it public, and hardly ever verbalized it around the home. The only time he discussed it with anyone outside of the family was one afternoon when a pair of Jehovah’s Witnesses knocked on the door.

          As soon as they opened with their “These are difficult times, trying times with all the suffering and pain in the world today,” recitation, Father nodded and listened. Everything they started with was right up his alley. End of the world Armageddon stuff. He invited them inside. But quickly their mission to evangelize my father was in turmoil as he revealed his own unholy visions of the world’s end, which, I’m sure in some way probably agreed with their interpretation of the end times, accounting for slight differences in terminology and  certain specifics. I overheard only part of the conversation, but the looks on their faces went from hopeful to horrified in no time. I now wish I had hung around to hear what was said. All I know is when they left it was abruptly, and they said nothing to my father or to each other. Although they seemed troubled all the way down the sidewalk, Father carried himself with extra confidence that evening.

         

          It was some time before the cloud of snow and dust settled and we could see anything. Although the cairn put us twenty feet above the mountain’s surface, the avalanche sent snow more than three times that high. Fortunately, the bulk of the snowy mass—the snow heavy and fast and hard enough to do any damage—only flew high enough to hit me, and not my family on top of the cairn. Mother and Father had dragged me up before I was swept away, but not before I sustained injuries. My left leg was broken and I was pierced by ice that cut through my clothes. Once the cloud of snow cleared we assessed the situation.

          We were covered in white, snow lodged into the most hidden recesses of our clothing, our faces frosted over, our noses and eyes dripping, our lips peeling, each of us caught in a mixture of relief and horror.

          “All OK?” shouted Father. “Is everyone alright?”

          Ulsa threw off her coat and brushed the snow out of her clothes, and Mother shook her head, making a little avalanche of her own.

          “I hope no one got shit and piss on themselves,” said Alda, looking over the side of the cairn.

          “Alda, stop,” said Mother. “Are you hurt?”

          “I mean our shit and piss. Down there. Looks like it’s covered.”

          Father examined my leg, and applied pressure to find where the bone was broken.

“Ow! Stop,” I said. “Doesn’t matter where it’s broken. It’s broken.”

“It does matter,” he said. “If your bone came through your skin I have to know. I’ll build you a splint once we’re… Oh, goddammit.”

          “What?” asked Mother. She crawled to my side and looked at my leg as Father pressed against it. “Are you OK, dear?”

          I nodded.

          “Our tent and the supplies are gone,” said Father. “I dropped them when I dropped Ulsa. They’re covered in ten feet of snow,” he pointed to the newly covered ground.

          It was impossible to retrieve the tent or the rest of Father’s backpack. After the avalanche our surroundings were different. No footprints, no sign of us having ever been on the mountain, everything beneath us was new, a blanket of snow over the world. We climbed down the cairn, which was only a ten foot climb with the thick level of snow below. For a short time we sat against the cairn to avoid the wind. No one spoke. We drank water and ate small rations, and were on the move again. Father and Alda helped me walk with my arms slung over their shoulders and my broken leg dragging behind. Movement was harsh. In two hours we were surrounded by trees. I rested with Ulsa while Mother prepared food. Father and Alda took the axe I carried in my backpack and attacked a tree nearby until they had enough wood to build a lean-to large enough for the five of us.

          The help I could provide was limited, but I assisted Alda and Father in building the shelter between two close trees. The five of us crammed inside and Father used the leftover wood to build a splint for my leg.

          Wasting no time, we used the firestarters to build two fires, one beside each opening of the lean-to, but far enough from the wood and cover for safety. We had our cell phones with us. Mother tried hers first, then Alda, then me, and Father. No signal. Nothing at all. We turned them off to preserve the batteries.

          We ate a large supper as it got dark, and Father told us things would be alright. While studying the map he estimated we were thirty miles from the car, even further from any form of civilization. With my injuries slowing our movement it would be at least three days before we could make it back. If Father hadn’t lost his bag we’d have had enough food for three more days. Now we had enough for a day. Our sleeping gear wasn’t adequate for the night without a tent,  so it was a cold sleep, haunted first by the endless howl of wolves, then by silence.

          Father awoke early to hunt and fish. Mother and Ulsa took inventory of the supplies we had left. Alda gathered more wood to keep the fire alive and I tried to build crutches out of it so we could keep moving at an almost regular pace once Father returned. We ate beef jerky and carrots through the day, each of us doing what we could to maintain the fires. Father came back empty handed in the mid-afternoon, hungry and thirsty and tired.

          “Nothing’s out there,” he said. “I spent two hours fishing, but the only lake for miles is empty or dead. Haven’t seen anything but a few hawks.” He had wasted half his ammo trying to shoot birds out of trees. He helped me with my crutches, reinforced my splint, and all the spirit and light in his manner from the day before was gone, replaced by an animal hard-coded for the wild. We were thrown into true survival.

          The next day we moved toward the car, avoiding every climb and steep descent on my behalf. This increased the distance we had to travel, but it left us with more energy. We ate minimally, drank only enough for hydration, and we kept the conversation positive or stupid. Anything to distract us. Father’s thermometer on his belt said the temperature was eleven degrees. It was the warmest day yet.

          His paranoia about an apocalypse had never seemed to interfere with his daily life. His job and his marriage and we, his family, were unaffected, as far as I could tell. He’d received a promotion only months prior to our trip into the mountains. His emotional state was always good. The only glimpse we had of his theory of the end came at random moments, during dinners, or while watching TV at night. He’d mention something in passing, but with seriousness and an air of imminence. One occasion he spoke about his brother Lars who had recently had a son. Lars and his wife celebrated the occasion like all parents do, with countless photographs and announcements and good feelings. Father took it as any brother would, congratulated Lars, and played the role of Uncle well.

          But those happy smiling faces, those beaming expressions of joy only parents can claim, said Father in the privacy of our home, would be very different if for every child born on this earth the parents were made aware of the long lasting effects their newest addition to the overabundant human population would have. And if they could visualize the spread of government owned farmland, the unnatural growth of resources to accommodate the exponential rise in humankind’s numbers, and could know with absolute certainty the ugly future awaiting their offspring, all parents would regret their contribution, would regret the very glee with which they welcomed their children into the world.

When I asked if he felt this way about my sisters and me he said he of course loved us and cherished us, but that responsible adults should wait until their own parents died before giving birth. This would be the only way to maintain a balance in human numbers without killing off the population. And then, he said, it was only a good idea if one could ensure that the world would not become the nightmare wasteland it was destined to. It sounds like a downer, but conversation never got too serious or intense when he discussed these things. He wasn’t open to opinions. We listened while he talked, which allowed him to fizzle out quick. When it seems that everyone buys what you’re saying, some folks will let it be. Others will become more animated and will never stop talking. Father was the former sort of person, so we nodded and said nothing, and that was that.

          The end of day four descended upon us. Our food was almost gone, and we had traveled only nine miles in the sunlight. Father’s face showed the beginnings of a beard, and all of us looked rough, drained of life, colorless, like we hadn’t slept in weeks. This was when it hit me we might not make it. We were exhausted and hungry. I looked at my sisters, both showing a surprising amount of courage and calm in the circumstances. Neither wanted to be here, but neither complained. Everyone knew the danger of our situation. Fear was in us, but it didn’t paralyze us.

Father told us about edible berries and plants; which ones were poisonous, which ones were medicinal. Without visual aids none of his lecturing made any difference. Along the way, before nightfall, Father and I picked a few of the scarce plants we found, mostly roots and weeds, many of which we were unable to identify. Father tested them for edibility by rubbing them on his skin or tasting small parts of them and waiting for effects. It was time to stop for the night and build a new camp. Again we constructed a lean-to and a fire. Father refrained from eating while the rest of us boiled and washed the plants found through the day, devouring them in careful intervals. We tried our phones that night. No signal. In the still of the night, while the others slept, I thought I felt a rumbling in the ground. My mind turned to the avalanche. Only two days gone, but it seemed like an old experience that had defined my life. The world shook as the wall of snow had chased us down the mountain. It sent tremors through me even while trying to sleep.

          The next day saw the end of our food supply. It was Thanksgiving. We pulled apart the lean-to and took as many pieces of it with us as we could, to save ourselves the inevitable task of cutting and gathering more wood at night. Father mapped out a journey to the car that would take us past a frozen lake he could fish. Spirits were low, and energy was lower. My leg was beginning to heal in a misaligned way, but we were helpless to change that. The pain it caused was almost unbearable and was intensified by the cold. I couldn’t move for more than a few minutes at a time, for merely holding my leg at an angle so as to not make contact with the ground was too strenuous for my muscles and bone. Ulsa cried on that day, asking Mother if we were going to die in the mountains. Instead of sitting around the dinner table eating turkey and stuffing and once-a-year delicacies in the warmth of our home, we were freezing and starving in the mountains over two hundred miles away, on the verge of death.

          By a stroke of good fortune we came upon a dead rabbit not long after starting out in the morning. It had been partially eaten, but much of it remained, and was in a surprising lack of decay due to the cold. Immediately Father cleaned it, and Alda and I built a fire.

         Our portions were small, but the nourishment seemed to hit us right away. We had energy to move again. For the first time in two days we made jokes and talked as if there was a possibility of returning to civilization. Father attempted to show us how to store meat in the cold to preserve it. Although he demonstrated his lesson with the inedible remains of the rabbit, none of us paid close attention. The morbid corpse reminded us of our own possible fates.

          “Happy Thanksgiving,” said Ulsa as she stuffed her handful of meat in her mouth.

          “Rabbits, turkeys, what’s the difference?” said Father. “It’s OK. You don’t have to laugh. Too cold for jokes, I know.”

          “First thing I’m eating when we get home is a turkey. A whole turkey. And I’m taking a shower with only scolding hot water.”

          “You’ll burn yourself, honey,” said Mother. “That hot water’s not going anywhere.”

          “You can have turkey in the bath, if you want” said Father. “Hot water, hot turkey, hell, you can have a turkey full of hot water if that’s your thing.”

          “Gross.”

          “But your mother’s right. That hot water ain’t going anywhere. Unless we’re not home in time to pay the water bill. Maybe we’ll get a hotel. Nothing to worry about.”

          We made it to the lake before the sun went down, meaning we had gone seven miles since morning. Not a good pace, but the best we could manage. The temperature was minus two Fahrenheit. Wind was picking up, turning the cold sharper. We set up camp about two hundred yards from the lake, where the swaying, wind-beaten trees provided the barest shelter. Once more we tried our phones. No signal.

Alda and I were able to reconstruct the lean-to in considerably less time while Father and Ulsa went to the lake to fish.  While helping Mother build the fire my sister and I took the opportunity to ask about Father’s visions of the end.

          “Oh, no,” said Mother, “it’s not based on any books or conspiracy websites. He doesn’t read that stuff, you know. He reads the news and he takes from that. I admit I don’t understand it myself. He has filing cabinets full of newspapers and magazine articles he says are vital to understanding it all. Seems every week I find a new set of notes he’s written on the possible scenarios related to the crumbling of the Great American Empire. And he has related bookmarks on the internet, over two hundred at least, I remember. But that was weeks ago. Who knows how many more he’s added.”

          An orange glow came from within the branches and wood we’d piled together. Our fire was alive. The warmth was immediate, but stifled by wind.

          “He talks about it with you,” said Alda. “Almost every night you’re in your room. We know you’re talking about it.”

          “Does he tell you what he ‘sees’ when he envisions this downfall of humanity?” I asked.

          “It’s not the downfall of humanity, honey. It’s something else. Though I suppose you could say the downfall of humanity is a logical conclusion from the picture he paints. It’s scary the way he talks about it. But he takes it with ease, and he wants us to make it through. That’s why we’re…” and Mother’s eyes turned red, “out here. Learning to survive.” She laughed when she heard herself say that. As if waiting for her to finish, just as the last words left Mother’s mouth the ground quaked hard, audible and deep, as though a great hole were opening in the earth. But all around us nothing changed. In a minute all was still.

“Was that…” Alda’s eyes were white balls piercing the wind.

“Yes, honey,” said Mother.

“An earthquake out here?”

“Last night I thought--”

I was interrupted by a scream from the lake. My heart fell into my stomach when we saw it was Father and he had Ulsa in his arms, running toward us. Mother’s scream was worse than Father’s.

          We ran to him but he pushed past us and set Ulsa down beside the fire, on a sleeping bag. He said nothing as he tore off her clothes and threw them aside. They were soaked. “Take them all off!” he yelled to Mother, who quickly undressed my sister. He hurriedly and clumsily took off his own jacket and his sweater, and as soon as Mother had removed the last of Ulsa’s clothes he threw his own on top of her, tightly wrapping them around her body.

          “What happened!?” Mother screamed, with no response from Father. As he tightly wrapped her in his garments he replied:

          “It was rumbling… She fell through the ice.  She was under for too long, too many…” he was short of breath. “Too many… too long. An earthquake, I think. Oh God, my girl...”

          Mother fell on top of both, desperately providing her own body heat.

          Ulsa was in shock. She spit up water and her body was shaking. The wind was relentless and only grew faster. Alda and I asked what we could do to help, and Father ordered us to maintain the fire, to make it larger, and to bring more sleeping bags out for Ulsa. We obeyed.

          As the wind picked up we knew we had to improve the lean-to. It wasn’t going to provide enough shelter for any of us, certainly not for Ulsa.  Alda and I collected wood and brush wherever we could find it to build walls, and draped our sleeping bags over the sides. The fire was blown out by the wind over and over again, and Mother used up the rest of our fire starters attempting to keep it going. The temperature was falling.

          Darkness seemed to come slowly. Ulsa died in the night. She went quietly and without a fight, with all of us hoping it was as painless as it looked. There was nothing we could do. Everything seemed to become still while it sank in she was gone, even as the violent winds outside grew worse. Father said a blizzard was coming. I saw the future of our family, saw Ulsa disappearing from everything, vanishing from holidays, vanishing from family photographs, vanishing from every special event and anything that would hold us together. Her own infinite possible paths through life suddenly dimmed out, disappearing into fiction. It struck hard and immediate. A part of every one of us had ceased to be, existing now only in memory. A dam opened and a scourge of thoughts came through, an inner act of violence that dwarfed the weather and the burning cold.

There was no time to bury Ulsa. We left her in sleeping bags and Father’s coat and sweater outside the shelter. Mother and Alda were incapacitated with grief and freezing tears, screaming and demanding things of the gods and the hands of fate that took our young sister so carelessly and hatefully. Their mourning was almost as punishing as Ulsa’s death. I couldn’t cry or scream or express myself. I was frozen by the loss. Crushed and rendered helpless. Father was blind determination. He built a fire inside the lean-to, its smoke exiting through an opening at the top, and I helped reinforce the walls with more wood. The wind was picking up. Snow fluttered down from the sky. Our weakness paired with our grief seemed to set us up for a quick demise. When you let your attention go to the morbid reality around you it pulls you into mental quicksand. It’s a slow, uncomfortable sink. But when the rest of your family’s survival depends on your actions you find a way to rip yourself from the quicksand however you can.

          Father and I buried the lean-to’s posts as deep as we could in the frozen soil, breaking the ground with sticks and rocks. We required constant retreats from the wind and cold to the fire that Mother and Alda tried desperately to keep alive. Father hadn’t caught anything in the lake before Ulsa had fallen in. We were starving. With hunger and all but the most ultimate defeat in our bodies, we slept in a tightly bound cluster around the fire. I hoped if death took any more of us, it would do so in the painlessness of sleep.

          Three feet of snow accumulated in the night. We awoke to yet another field of fresh white. The lean-to had become better insulated by the snow, leaving only the top open for ventilation. The winds couldn’t tear it down now. We buried Ulsa that day, close to the lake. The plan was to have her body exhumed after our hopeful return home, followed by a proper funeral. We marked her grave with a cross made of long sticks, her coat hanging from it like a scarecrow. That day was the most miserable any of us had known. With almost four feet of snow on the ground and the temperature steady around zero, starvation rendering us weak, grief rendering us weaker, and a mild wind making matters worse, we were unable to travel. We remained at the site indefinitely.

          Father caught one fish the day we buried Ulsa. It was small and fed the four of us. Nothing was said by Alda or myself, and Mother and Father spoke minimally through the day. When they did, it was a bitter storm of spite in which Mother scorned Father, cursed at him, and spit hate for bringing us out where we would die. He was too hurt and weak to fight. He apologized, but insisted we were out here for a purpose, although that purpose now seemed more trivial than ever. All day their battle ensued, while my sister and I were left to watch. Only when they were too tired did Mother and Father become silent again.

          “This isn’t what I intended,” he said. “It wasn’t part of… I’m so sorry. I never meant for anyone to get hurt.”

          “Hurt?” said Mother, tears streaming down her cheeks. “Ulsa’s not hurt. She’s dead.” And again a fight broke. Father continuously apologized until he saw it made no difference. When he told Mother we had two options, to quit and die, or to continue on and survive, she let down and only wept.

We held onto what little energy we had, bearing our hunger pains, drinking melted snow and fighting cold. It seemed whatever fluids we put in our bodies came right back out as tears or piss, stinging our faces in the freezing wind, or steaming from the snowy ground like fire. Mother and Alda were in heavy mourning, with an equal fear and hatred of death in their manner. Before nightfall Father built large letters with rocks in the snow in an opening close to our campsite. It said HELP. It was hoped the sign would be seen by a low flying airplane, or a helicopter.

          The next day was warmer, at fifteen degrees, and no wind. But the snow fell through the afternoon. I collected firewood while Father fished. Alda finally left the lean-to trying to collect berries or nuts fallen from trees, an almost useless task considering the constantly replenished snow. Mother spent a great deal of time around Ulsa’s burial site. We ate two fish that evening, our largest feast in days. Father examined my leg to be sure it was healing correctly. It wasn’t, but there was nothing we could do. The pain wouldn’t subside. Each of us tried our phones periodically throughout the day, turning them off and removing the dying batteries immediately after finding no signal. The night was again filled with screaming and crying by both parents.

          The following day was our eighth in the wilderness, and our third since food had run out. All we’d eaten since then were three fish and part of a rabbit. Father was spending more time at the lake trying to catch fish, though it became progressively more difficult to find anything. Mother remained in the shelter, her spirits dropping with every passing day. Alda searched the surrounding woods for edibles. I stayed inside with Mother, as it was hard for me to go anywhere with the pain in my leg. Our misery complemented that of the other, but over time we found it possible to be thankful that we were still alive. Father brought back nothing that evening. Nor did Alda. As we huddled around the fire, another earthquake shook us from any semblance of comfort we might have found. When it was over Father said it was Mount Monozero trying to tear itself away from the planet.

          I was sure the ninth day would be our last. That’s when we would die. Cold and starvation would eat us alive if a pack of hungry wolves didn’t find us first. Whatever Father’s visions of the end, they wouldn’t matter to us. Our graves would be here, fifty or sixty miles from civilization, frozen under feet of snow. There were no sounds of wildlife in these parts of the mountains. We didn’t hear birds or bugs or anything alive besides our own breathing. Even the nights were chillingly quiet. Somehow, every other living thing had escaped to someplace hospitable. The animals were suited for this, we were not. We were stupid humans foraying into the wild where we don’t belong, from where we’d been too long removed, evolved far away from the capacity to live in nature.

“I’m going out to set traps,” said Father. He’d saved the fish’s heads and bones for this occasion. He left around noon. The three of us huddled around the fire and said little, while the wind outside howled overhead. You couldn’t see more than twenty feet in front of you because of densely falling snow. Inside was the only place that almost felt safe.

Without prompting, Mother began ranting almost incoherently about Father’s theories and fears. She was in tears the whole time. Alda and I only listened.

“Surveillance and classified plans, you know… It’s what he talks about. He has so many notebooks of NSA traps and plots and government... things. Your father’s a madman. He’s sadistic and insane, and I should have always known. Nothing made me suspect it earlier… Only these visions. Not visions, these horrors he predicts. He’s making it up. He has to be. None of it makes sense, no matter how slow he talks about it. Your father believes there’s a program being implemented somewhere, either now or soon, to turn us into a slave state, or… All of us—into something directly caused by a dizzying number of factors in the world.

 “One night he talked to me for four hours about technology companies pushing for a weird future he said was going to feed into a massive system every thought and idea we have, every neural firing, every little synapse or spark of emotion and human individuality, whatever’s in our heads to make us what we are—he said it was all going into a complex amassing of modern technology, both private and government run. Not only technology, but policy, laws, higher up things. He said information companies, or intelligence companies, something of the sort, would lead it. The Brainstorm, he called it. Or that’s what they called it. Once you plug up to it it’ll generate a false reality for you. Billions of pieces of input are used to generate a facsimile of reality, but over time this becomes a prison for the mind. I don’t know… Now it sounds stupid, the way I say it. And there are other programs, programs making scapegoats out of regular citizens in an effort to serve some ulterior motive. And he has these motives written down, mapped out, like he’s seeing it happen. Stories in the news come through every few weeks that he says fall in line with his model and predictions. And the thing about all this paranoia is that he’s got pages and pages, volumes, of documents he claims supports all of it. I haven’t read it all. He’s showed it to me, and it’s horrifying any way you look at it. Either it’s true and too complicated for me to follow, or he’s truly mad and has become so obsessively paranoid and delusional that he’s taken unrelated bits of information from every known source in the world and glued it together into some abominable framework of prophecies and dark things. Your father is insane, and we’ve let him lead us into the mountains where we’re helpless to do anything. I’m so sorry. I love you both. I love Ulsa.”

           I half expected Mother to accuse Father of murdering Ulsa, of having thrown her into the water and keeping her under long enough to let her die. She didn’t say any of that. But what she did say was almost as surprising. For hours she went on. She spoke of statistical models Father had come across for various populations or subjects, though she couldn’t remember the specifics. Without telling us anything important it was impossible to place much stock in what she shared. She spoke of classified information our father possessed through means she didn’t understand. The startling thing about his predictions, she said, was the level of consistency in them. They never changed over the months, they only grew deeper. As he made new “discoveries” and uncovered more information, he was able to flesh out his vision of apocalypse that was completely consistent with everything he had shown her so far, and every crackpot thing he had said up to that point. Look! he would say. What I showed you last Friday--it’s been confirmed by this and this. And what I predicted last month, it’s come true. This piece of evidence here strengthens this aspect of my theory over here. It was a maddening scatter of connected pieces of information only Father understood, and patterns only he saw. Psychology textbooks would call this paranoid schizophrenia.

          He returned to camp as the sun dipped below the horizon, the orange tint over everything fading into night.

          “Caught a fox,” he said. “Left part of it in the trap to attract more animals. But this ought to do.” He showed us the meat. It was already skinned, removed entirely from the animal. No hair remained. It was meat and bone, about four pounds of it, spongy and with barely any smell. He cooked it up. It was better than the rabbit, almost like veal.

          The night was quiet. Father calmly discussed plans for departure once the snow let up, though he said it looked like we would be stuck for a few more days.

          “My rescue sign was covered in snow,” he said. “So I dug it up and collected more rocks. Now it’s bigger, probably won’t be covered so easily. No one’ll miss it if they fly close enough.”

The next day Alda offered to help Father fish or hunt, but after Ulsa’s death he had ordered us to stay far away from the lake. She helped me cut wood instead.

          Father returned with another mass of meat in the early afternoon, and we ate well. It tasted the same as before. He’d already skinned it and left behind the important bits, he said, to catch more. What we didn’t eat he stored in the snow, covered enough to mask its smell. More snow came, but we had food to preserve us.

          Days passed, and for most very little was done. We tried to keep active when we weren’t maintaining the lean-to or cleaning what we could of our supplies. Alda and I had become master fire-makers. It was our primary responsibility, and we did it better and better with each day. Temperatures fluctuated. Some days were in the twenties with no wind, others dropped below zero, sometimes with heavy wind. With the high-piled snow we insulated the lean-to incredibly well, making it almost invincible to the breeze, yet well ventilated and warm. The breaks in snowfall didn’t last long. Snow seemed to never disappear, only to accumulate. We carved trenches from the lean-to into the trees, toward the lake, but never cutting very far before having to quit. And they’d fill in after only two days at most. Father went to check his traps every few days, after the meat he tried to preserve had either run out or started to rot. When he came back with anything he brought it back skinned, ready to cook. Sometimes it was organs, sometimes it was meat hanging messily from the bones, sometimes it smelled rotten and we didn’t eat.

          Alda asked Father about his world-ending prophecies one day, something that we’d been afraid to do for so long. Maybe it was the implication such a question might make, that by asking him we were somehow admitting he was right, or that he was onto something big. But if we were to die together, it made sense we should be open and share everything. Like a family.

          “You ask a hard question,” he said, while we sat around the fire, his inch long beard white with snow. The fire made his eyes glow like a sorcerer. “Your mother and I--”

          “Don’t bring me into this,” Mother said. Of the few words she spoke over those days, most were sharp.

          Father nodded, then continued. “I’ve…” He paused, and his eyes wandered, as though he didn’t know how to go on, like he was looking for the right words. “There’s a lot going on on this planet at any given time that has far reaching consequences, not only for those involved, but for those who have no idea, and never will have any idea what’s happening. It might even be happening to people who are oblivious to the nature of the… the activity. Whatever you want to call it.”

          “You’re not making this any clearer,” I said. I turned to Alda. “This is why we shouldn’t talk about it. He doesn’t know what he’s talking about. He hasn’t got a clue. He’s full of shit.”

          “Now wait a minute…” he said. “It’s not an easy thing to lay out in a casual way. Knowing where to start is hard.”

          “Bullshit,” I said. “It’s hard because it’s bullshit. You’re insane, you’re delusional. You live in a world we don’t live in, with conspiracies and problems and ideas that you’ve invented purely from imagination, with no relation to real life or our lives, with nothing that makes sense, and with no—no consideration for anything else. You’re--”

          “Calm down,” said Alda. Mother only looked at me and said nothing. Father was quiet.

          “You put us here.” I yelled. “We’re gonna die because of you. Slow as fuck. Ulsa’s dead. Everything around us and that’s happened to us, it’s your fault. All of it. And for what? So you could teach us to survive? There’s no holocaust coming. There’s no apocalypse or end of the world as we know it. There’s no massive conspiracy to turn the country into a slave state or to ruin us or to use us like cattle. The only thing that’ll ever destroy us is you.”

          It was difficult to imagine Father insane. Despite the vague shadows of his theories we caught glimpses of through Mother, and despite the insanity they seemed to imply, he was otherwise too rational, too level-headed, too focused and capable for us to consider him crazy. Even though he had gotten us into this dead-end trap of slow death, he was also the only one keeping us alive. By a very large margin he was the hero. But he was also the cause of our misfortune.

          “It’s happening right now,” he finally said. “Not here, not to us. It looks like we’ve got it bad, I know. Your sister—my daughter, our daughter—is dead. And we’re trapped in this shelter with winds and endless snow everywhere we look. We’re hungry and cold and weak. Every day could be our last. Don’t you think I’m trying to do what I can to get us out of this? I didn’t want this. But it’s better than the alternative, better than what’s back there, at home right now. It’s worse than this.” And he got quiet, with a grim darkness in his face, staring out the opening in the roof.

          I took my crutches and crawled out of the lean-to, too angry to talk, too worked up to listen to anything else. I sloshed my way through waist-high snow until I was exhausted and fell into it face first. I lied there for what seemed like hours, with my head turned toward Mount Monozero rising massively over the horizon to the east. I watched the mountain swallow the sun. And it watched me.

          By the middle of December we had made no progress. The same spot, the same weather, the same distance from the car—which was by then doubtless covered in feet of snow and might not have even started if we could have reached it. I won’t say we were used to our situation, but we had adapted to survive. Mother was leaving the lean-to from time to time, but never made it very far before returning to rest and to sit with her thoughts. She prepared what little food Father brought back, and kept quietly to herself. Alda spent her time collecting rocks to secure the fire to a pit, and wood to keep it burning. I helped with that, and despite earlier warnings, helped Father at the lake when he decided ice-fishing was our only viable option now that the traps had been used up. We didn’t talk about his visions of apocalypse. It was as though the conversation had never happened.

          Our cell phones had been dead about a week.

          There was a streak of warmer days sometime around Christmas, with weather rising into the thirties, during which point a considerable amount of snow disappeared. It didn’t matter much, because we still had almost three feet of  snow to march through if we were to escape the desolate white wasteland. In my condition I couldn’t do that. I told everyone else they should try to make it to the car without me, as it was the most sensible idea. They could send a rescue party as soon as they got to the closest town. Father let us know how impossible this suggestion was. I would die in a few days, he said, with no ability to move more than a few hundred feet a day. And he was probably right. But the thought of my family dying or suffering because of my handicap was something I couldn’t tolerate. Even if I had been able-bodied, said Father, there was no hope of us making it to the car without getting lost or finding ourselves in worse conditions.

          The pain of hunger grew with the days. By early January it had been almost two weeks since we had eaten more than a few sparse dead plants a day. Mother was sick. Our weakness was such that even leaving the shelter became a chore. As our bodies grew thin with little consumption, it became harder for us to stay warm.

          “If she doesn’t eat soon,” said Father, as Mother slept, “she’ll die.”

          Although we had figured it out already, his words hit Alda and I hard. Our end days had arrived. There came a strange sense of calm with the idea that the misery that ensnared us would be over.

          Under the spell of starvation, the brain goes through a series of difficult episodes and transformations. One who suffers prolonged hunger will hallucinate, will have intense emotional distress and hysteria, may become lethargic, and detached from reality. It is perhaps this last ailment, the detachment from reality, and the sense that life has become a bizarre, terrifying, surreal dream that is responsible for my sister and me taking it less seriously than we normally would have when Father unveiled his next plan for our survival.

          He took rope and his knife from our supplies, and left the lean-to. Standing outside and looking in, he told Alda and I to get the cooking utensils ready.

          “Be ready to skin and clean it when I bring it back,” he said. He marched off through the knee-deep snow.

          Less than an hour later something flew in through the lean-to doorway and landed on the ground in front of the fire. Father crawled in.

          “Cook it,” he shouted, as though he were in immense pain.

          Alda and I looked at the long bloody thing on the ground. It was the bottom half of Father’s leg, bare and mangled and red. The rope was tied around his knee as a tourniquet, and a trail of blood followed him.

          Alda screamed piercingly, incoherent and hysterical and violent. I said we took it easily when Father did what he did, which is true, considering the nature of it. His face was white with snow, and he looked mad as he crawled toward us, demanding we cook his leg. After Alda became calm, which took only minutes of Father subduing her and asking her to remember our mother’s health, we listened as Father explained that our only option was to eat what he gave us.

          Neither my sister or I would touch the dismembered leg. We backed away from it, cowering in the corner of the lean-to. We watched in silence as Father skinned and cooked his leg in the fire. He wasn’t in shock. Maybe that had passed. Or maybe shock never came. The blood pooled on the floor around his knee, where he’d cut away everything. The speed with which he skinned his own leg was surprising. Mother slept through it all. When Alda expressed worry that Father’s wound would kill him, or that it would welcome infection, he pressed his bleeding nub into the burning coals to sterilize it and to seal the gash. I passed out.

          It took another day of starving and of Father telling us our only two options—eat or die—for us to eat his leg. Mother was awake and sick and in such a poor mental state that she didn’t know what she was eating. When Alda tried to tell her, it was like talking to a baby.

          Father ate it, too.

          “When I’m gone,” he said, as he chewed the meat of his own calf, “I will be with you. Always with you, always part of you.” His fiery eyes scanned us. “Inside you.”

          In our starved and lethargic state the conversation seemed false, like a figment of imagination where the more shocking and disgusting things were, the farther it was removed from reality, and therefore the less we had to take it seriously. Like an eerie dream. The meat wasn’t bad. It tasted like the fox Father had caught in his traps, a little bit like pork, with a softer texture. He fed Mother throughout the day.

          Strength slowly returned. Sleep came more easily. With each feeding we grew less opposed to cannibalism. Familial cannibalism, fatherly sacrifice, something to keep us going. It made sense in a sick and awful way. But would I have done it for the family? Would Alda? Would Mother? When Father removed the rest of his leg days later, he did it in front of us, inside the shelter, with Alda screaming at him to stop, as Mother slept through everything. He cut through the bone in under a minute, adrenaline pushing him to do the unthinkable. I remember the look on his face as he carved away the last of his limb. He seemed unshaken, again blind determination overtaking him, as if no other option existed, as if he knew this was the only possibility. Even with the tourniquet of rope wrapped around his thigh, blood stained the snow red. I crawled outside and threw up.

          Mother regained her health over the period of a week, after we built better insulation to keep the lean-to warmer, and regularly fed her water and the ghastly limb of our father. As she became coherent again, her shock at finding Father missing a leg was second only to the shock at learning she had eaten part of it. Her disgust wasn’t as severe as we had expected.

          “Where does it end?” was her first question. “Will we eat you until you die? And then what? Which one of us is next? I’ll die for my children, I’ll die for you. But I won’t have anyone dying for me. I won’t let you.”

          “No one else is dying. Not you, not the kids, or me. But I’ll do everything I have to… We’re going home. We will leave this place behind.”

          My sister and I left the shelter to let our parents fight through their decisions. Thanks to the pounding wind, their words were incomprehensible by the time we were twenty feet from the lean-to. I took in the white wasteland around us with new eyes. The eyes of someone who had accepted death. Neither of us had anything to say. Alda walked through the remains of the trenches we had dug and re-dug, and I followed her, limping slow. She walked all the way to Ulsa’s grave. The sleeve of her coat we’d hung on the wooden cross was sticking out of the snow. The rest of it was buried. We dug in the snow to clear space around the grave marker, which had evidently fallen over in the wind. But when we cleared a way to the ground, we found dug up earth. Her grave had been opened. A ten inch pit of snow and rocks was all we found. Ulsa was gone.

          We returned to the lean-to to find our parents hugging, Mother crying and thanking Father for his sacrifices, and for doing what he could to keep us alive. In all the possible futures you plan for yourself, none of those futures involve walking in on your mother hugging your father, thanking him for feeding his legs to the family. But your future never happens how you plan it.

          Their moment of peace was short-lived, interrupted by Alda screaming at Father, attacking him with balled up fists. Mother and I pulled her off, Father’s face was sunken in, as though his brief happiness had been flipped into immediate grief. He looked down as Alda screamed.

          “He fed her to us! He made us eat her! There were no foxes!” She was in tears and soon screaming obscenities and wordless rage.

         Mother and I did nothing but restrain Alda, and Father lied on the ground, the stump of his leg bandaged, his eyes burning holes in the snow.

          “There was no alternative,” he said, but he was cut off by Alda’s cries. Mother collapsed, leaving me to handle Alda alone.

          “Our sister!? Your daughter? Oh my god…”

          “We would be dead right now, Alda…”

          “I’d rather be dead!”

          “Would you rather your mother and your brother be dead? Would you have the rest of your family die so as to preserve the… to avoid a taboo? You’ll eat my body, but not that of your sister?”

          “You lied to us! No foxes. There were no foxes.”

          I said: “You know he had to. We wouldn’t have eaten if he had…” I felt light headed, “told us what we were eating.”

          “WHO we were eating!” She backhanded me in the chest.

          “Stop it!” Mother grabbed Alda’s arms and pinned her to the ground. “Control yourself.”

          Father didn’t move for the rest of the night. He lied slumped on the ground, responding to questions with short answers. Alda and Mother came around to understanding his actions. Understanding doesn’t mean agreement. But none of us could say what better option he had. Given the circumstances, we accepted that there was no alternative. Our sister had been violated, her resting place destroyed, her corpse disrespected and used for something it wasn’t intended. The way Father explained it, he saw it as a ritual in which the dead become part of the living. A unification of one blood, a family consuming their own. In his words, there was no more appropriate treatment of a human corpse. There was no better way for him to alienate himself from the family.

          What our father had learned carving up Ulsa over the weeks he applied to the preparation of his own leg. Would he continue until he was dead? By that point I was sure we would never be found. He wanted us to eat him so he would always be part of us. He was taken up by some spiritual idea of familial sharing, of consuming the flesh of the father, of absorbing the essence, or part of it, from another living thing, and having that living thing become part of us. But what then? Eat each other? Become “one” with each other by eating each other? Who dies first? Who survives? The idea went around from time to time, never in a positive light. At night I envisioned my sister and my mother hunched over my dead body, eating my guts. I saw my father’s corpse torn open by myself and Alda and Mother, eating his body like a ritual of completion. I saw us suffocating Alda in her sleep, cutting away her flesh to eat before she’d even fallen unconscious. I saw us setting Mother on fire, dousing her in water as soon as she died, and eating her roasted body with smiles on our faces. Cannibal smiles.

Eight days after he cut off the last of his leg he removed the foot from his other leg. That fed us for a day. Infection started shortly after. His ankle became brown around the amputation, and regardless of the sanitation measures he took it gradually became green and black. It looked like frostbite, but he identified it as gangrene. He cut off more of his leg, from the knee down. The way he looked when he finished, the weakness and delirium that seemed to control him, showed us he wasn’t going to make it out of the mountains alive. He chopped away at the blackened flesh on his separated leg, threw it in the fire, and we watched it burn. The smell that quickly filled the lean-to was unbearable. It strongly contrasted with the regular smell of burning human flesh, for which we’d developed a taste over the period of less than a month. It was the taste of survival, the taste of life.

It was most likely the pain of repeated amputation that put Father in a constant state of madness. In this light, the neurosis of his worldly predictions looked like a sensible conclusion. Here was a madman sharing our lean-to, no longer our father, no longer our flesh and blood, but a stranger stuck in psychosis, slowly losing his body to his family, the same family that ordered him to stop feeding himself to it. But his existence took on a new purpose, the purpose of fusing himself to loved ones via consumption. It was important to him that we not only survive, but that we take a part of him with us back into the world, no matter the condition we found it in. If we had been stuck for years, we could have imagined a vastly altered world waiting for us upon our return. But with only months of separation from civilization we were unable to envision a world that differed at all from what we knew. And it is that failure of imagination, said Father, that trapped us in a rut, a hole of stagnant thought, where we would dwell without progress if we never saw into the cracks in the exterior of our world. How could one see into these cracks? Father cast us into a world of strange thought, in which the further he drifted from reality and sanity, the more he aligned himself with visions of objective brilliance and prophecy.

He talked about Nicolaus Copernicus and Tycho Brahe and Johannes Kepler, comparing his own visionary powers to that of their combined efforts. Imagine the order of the solar system, the mathematical perfection with which the heavens behave. Copernicus the originator of the ordering of the skies, Tycho, the observational genius who captured truth, and Kepler, the architect of theory that united observation into a coherent and workable model. Three lifetimes it took for a cornerstone of scientific thought to come into being. My father saw himself as an equal visionary, a polymath who had courageously done the work of multiple geniuses, who had conducted a study of the world around us and constructed a full picture of what, in our lifetime, would come to be. Perhaps his model wasn’t as mathematical of that of the astronomers, but it was, as he called it, equally powerful and equally accurate.

His body became frail over time. His refusal to eat and his loss of blood and his adaptation to lost limbs were all to blame, but so was the cold, the lack of hope, the endless wind, the prospect of the family succumbing to the elements. Mother recovered her health. We watched over Father to prevent him from cutting off anymore of his body to feed us, but the damage was done. He explained to my sister and me how to prepare human meat, with his own rotting severed limbs as tools for illustration. He showed us how to remove the muscle and fat from the bone, how to drain the blood and roast everything until it was cooked thoroughly, indicated by its smell. This knowledge dumped me into a state I’d never experienced. Think about your father cutting parts off his body not only to save your life, but so he can instruct you how to do it to others. Or how to do it to him when he’s dead. Try to think what inexplicable things that does to the psyche. It tormented me almost as much as the act of cannibalism itself, the knowledge that I could prepare human meat if need be. It was as troubling as my newfound appetite for human meat.

“When I’m gone,” my father said early in the morning toward the end of January, “use the whole body. Every part of me becomes part of you. Promise me.” I assured him we would do what we had to in order to survive, but made no promise he would be our sustenance, or that his bones would become our tools, or that his blood our drinks. “It’s a heavy feeling,” he said. “But it’s liberating to know you’re the source of life for those you love. More freeing than anything else in the world.”

What changes occur in the human shell when the mind knows death is creeping close are beyond my understanding. If my father was at all a typical specimen, it’s not outwardly pretty. Something transcendental seems to go on inside that mass of flesh and bone, with the brain severing its communication with the nerves and the skin, the voice retreating to a cave where every word carries an incalculable weight and cryptic weirdness. Behavior itself virtually ceases, is replaced by inactivity, the silent, motionless awaiting of death. But he seemed at peace, and it gave me hope that Ulsa’s last moments were equally tranquil.

Alda decided Father’s declining condition was the most opportune time to interrogate him on his questionable prophecies. For starters, she wanted to know just what his prophecies were. Neither he nor Mother had been forthcoming about his end of the world fantasies, sharing nothing but stupid, vague hints of horror, indecipherable tantrums of fear, and meaningless, all-encompassing apocalyptic clichés, which continuously confused my sister and I, only adding to our already paralyzing anxiety. The spooky stories parents tell to their children to scare them out of bad habits and bad behavior held a peculiar similarity to what our parents were telling us, except that there was absolutely no significance to any of it, no lesson, no morals or values passed down. Just paranoia and terror. Mother, it became more and more apparent, had no clue what Father’s theories on the end of the world were. Not a speck of understanding. Although she’d spent many long nights talking with him in their room, her knowledge of his knowledge was nil. Having accepted his death was coming, Alda determined to get the information out of him, if only to understand some small corner of the mind of the man who pulled us out of civilization and exposed us to the merciless onslaught of nature.

          While he held onto life he told us everything he could. His eyes lit up with excitement, like they had been on the first day of our trip, excited to teach us something, to share knowledge with us that only he could give. There was no time for questions. He filled in every gap with sufficient data that poured out of him like it was just waiting for the right time. He was right in knowing that this moment was the only moment we would fully listen, a moment that neither Alda or I would interrupt him or challenge him or defy him, but would let him speak his last words. So he talked.

          “You’ll never know what it’s like to be a caged animal,” he said, his voice sounding more distant and polluted with every breath. “And for that you should be thankful. We’re animals in this family. I pulled you out of that cage and set you free. You and your mother. Ulsa is freest of us all. You found comfort in being part of a system because the system changes your most primitive nature. It tames us, and you can argue being tamed is what we need as humans, that it makes us one, it makes us work together and unites us in harmony toward some mighty goal or some blessed future. You can say we’re born into it and that it is the only way we can be. You can fight me and say comfort and safety are what evolved, civilized human beings thrive on, and that this security allows us to thrive. But when have any of you thrived? When have you accomplished anything or done anything worth remembering for an entire lifetime, or done something truly important that left a mark? Look at yourselves now. Battered and beaten and frozen and starving in the bare bones of nature’s belly… But more alive than you ever were. More aware of life, attuned to the visceral reality of existence, more deserving of what you have left. Captivity changes the psychology of anything alive. The comfort of captivity kills a part of the person or the animal that’s bound at the feet. It turns him from a hunter or a scavenger or a survivor into a prisoner, transforms the instinctual and problem solving tendencies of the mind into dull, predictable, pathetic banality. It reduces the mind and the body to a weakling state. Degradation spills from every pore. Comfort and captivity are bondage to an intricate endless order that demands conformity.

          “Your mother used to tell me this is the way things go, that with every generation, something we took for granted as a freedom or a privilege or a right was taken away, not because of enslavement to some totality of human depravity, but because the progression of the world and of society required it. Like we were moving forward and leaving these things behind. Bullshit. I’ve always  told her she was wrong. If you look at everything we’ve left behind, and pay attention to what we’ve accumulated to make up for it, if you’ve seen where we’re heading, you’ll slit your own throats. I’ve seen it and now I wait to die. With true freedom comes absolute peace. When you consume me, all peace and all goodness will have triumphed.”

          I could see Alda wanted to butt in and pick apart everything he said. She shook her head continuously, with a frustration stuck on her face. Father noticed.

          “You’re upset, Alda. You’re frustrated. You have so much to say and there’s so much going around in your head right now that you don’t know where to start, or which point to tear into first. The more I talk, the more overwhelming this feeling becomes. You want to lash out. You have these urges pushing against your insides, killing you with frustration. That’s the very mechanism that goes on inside all of us when we’re stuck in the web of this world. When you’re thrown into an unnatural habitat and limitations are imposed on your behavior and your thoughts, and your every waking hour is regulated by a clock that matches everyone else’s, and you begin to see the invisible lines you’re never to deviate from, the primitive instinct inside you flares up. It has to do something. But what? Few options are left to us… submission to the frustration, admitting defeat and going mad, but fighting without cause, which historically never ends well. Another option… growing complacent with the web. Quitting the struggle and accepting the spider’s fangs as they sink into you. What about escape?”

          “What about escape?” Alda mocked. “What about it?”

          “Alright,” I said. I placed my hand on her arm, subduing her.

          “This is escape,” said Father. “Each of us is a speck in a steadily transforming body of illusions. Our world and our species is that body. These illusions work together to present life as it is. We’re unaware of these transformations as they happen, because they happen with us as a constant part of them. When we look backward we’re able to see the process of transformation and to get a picture of how it has gone so far. The farther back we look, the bigger the picture becomes, and we start to understand the path this transformation takes. It’s like looking at an image that is constantly morphing into something new. We’re stuck in this metamorphosis, observing it from within. All we see when we look at the now is some misshapen, unidentifiable thing that describes our current state. We look backward and see what we’re morphing from, but never understand what we’re morphing into… Unless we study the details.”

          I couldn’t tell if he was trying to speak in cliche-sounding riddles, or if it came off this way because his brain was starved of nutrients and he had a foot in the grave. A bloody infected stump, rather. I got the impression he had ideas that were beyond his capacity to verbalize, but he was trying anyway. His vocabulary was no small thing, but even then it wasn’t enough. Some concepts escape any possibility of being expressed in language.

“This transformation is really billions or trillions or maybe innumerable  separate transformations occurring in synch, side by side by side by side. Scientists and historians and economists make careers of studying certain transformations and making sense of the world through them, through their glasses and microscopes and windows and computer screens. All their spectacles helping them make sense from one perspective. Together, and with the right eye, sense can be made from a larger perspective.” He turned his body, displacing his weight onto his other side.

“You know, I’ve learned something very important in studying everything I have. Important, but useless. I’m not going to give you the details of this prophecy I’ve concocted, because I’ve learned the details don’t matter anymore. No, I’ve been going over it in my head every day since we’ve been here. Now I see the details are only important until you have the complete picture. The details give you the picture, which, once you have it, is useless. I’ve learned that this path for humanity, the transformation composed of zillions of tinier transformations, will never be guided by thought or by the will of man, or by anything that can be controlled. Not by actions or choices. It’s guided by sheer necessity. All variables accounted for, it would go this way no matter what. The end result, and most of the states along this transformation, is inevitable. Some fight the tiny transformations, some embrace them, and no one is right or wrong. Everyone is an unknowing automaton pulled into the immutable change, their own reactions to the change are, themselves, necessary, are part of the process, part of that change, a tiny part of the transformation, because from every individual’s personal reaction to the changes around them sprouts a million other conditions that affect others, and that builds this web of influence and response, and becomes a part of the changing system of coupled mechanisms, that, when you step outside and look at it from a distance, resembles a pattern. Free will itself is a matter of contention. Whether or not we have it, everything we do feeds the transformation. We’re helpless to stop it because it has to happen. Why? There probably is no why. Or if there is, I haven’t found the answer. Maybe one of you will. Children are the future, aren’t they? You hear that a lot.”

“Dad,” said Alda, calmer now, though I could hear her holding back. “Slow down. Give us something, anything in the world, to prove you’re not a fucking lunatic who lost his mind a long time ago and who’s having schizophrenic delusions. It’s hard to sit here and listen to you after everything we’ve been through and to think you’re not talking from an acid trip. It’s hard to watch you fall apart, and even as you fall apart to see you hold onto this insanity that has endangered us.”

Beneath his beard a decrepit smile tore across his lips. “The predictive power of my observations will prove I am sane, honey. Every word I give you is planned. Maybe the astuteness of some prediction can convince you that my mind is not only sane, but it is the only one on the right track.”

Alda and I exchanged glances, then looked back at our decaying dad.

“The first thing I will give you is this: if you return to civilization you’ll be enslaved in a way you’ve never imagined. Everyone else already is. Heed my words when I say “Do not return. Find another way.” The second thing I will give you should put faith in you that I am right, and may serve to keep you free: That mountain out there that stands so dominantly in the distance… Mount Monozero. It will erupt soon.”

He was silent and his eyes stayed on us. When he didn’t speak for a moment, Alda asked him how he could possibly know that, and why it mattered. He didn’t answer and he didn’t move. He was dead.

          For the second time, the earth seemed to act at just the right moment to maximize its dramatic effect by shaking beneath us right when we could least handle it. Father’s death didn’t have time to sink in before the planet grinded away under our feet. Mother came inside asking if we were OK, and right away noticed Father’s body. I don’t know why I was surprised to see her cry. She fell to her hands and knees and crawled to him screaming, clasped his shirt in her hands, and pushed herself against his body. This was followed by a deafening explosion outside, after which the earth was still. My sense of time was broken, I don’t know how long the three of us were frozen looking at each other before Alda and I went outside. The day that had started bright and blue was masked with a black column of ash climbing through the sky from Mount Monozero. A series of smaller explosions boomed from the mountain, stopping our hearts, throwing pillars of smoke and specks of debris a thousand feet into the air. One after another: boom, boom, boom, the ash billowed out, immediately reminding me of the avalanche, but completely opposite in every way except its deadliness. The stuff seemed to rip through the sky with a howl, as if to send a warning that it was ready for victims. Father’s prediction had come to life. We stared for minutes, said nothing and thought nothing. Only fifteen miles away the nightmare swelled into the heavens, blooming into a mushroom cloud heralding our end. The wind was strong that day, blowing to the southeast, only a little off the path from the volcano to our location. The cloud grew larger, climbed higher, and soon the ash fell around us, lightly at first, then more heavily, outnumbering the snowflakes, a gray storm coming down like the start of a nuclear winter. We flew into the lean-to and told Mother what she already knew. She didn’t leave Father’s side.

          “We have to go!” shouted Alda.

          “Go where?” said Mother. “There’s nowhere to go! We can’t do anything!”

          “It might be alright,” I said. “Wind’s blowing slightly to the south. Maybe what we get will be minimal.”

          Alda threw me a piercing glance. “Are you ready to die?”

          “I’m not ready to run, if that’s what you mean. I can barely walk, Alda.”

          More explosions came from the mountain. Ash fell in through the opening in the lean-to’s roof, suffocating the fire until we were left in the cold. I wanted to say a lot of things, but everything that went through my head seemed it would only make the situation worse. I sat on the ground and brushed away some snow for Alda to sit down.

          “I think we’ll be OK.”

          Three geologists from the U.S. Geological Survey found us six days after the eruption. The area we’d spent those three months wasn’t frequented by outdoorsmen or anyone but the very rare individual or group looking to venture into the wild for a few weeks. The volcano brought the geologists out there. It was known that the area, particularly the mountain range, had increased tectonic activity, but no one knew Mount Monozero was a volcano waiting to explode. The eruption was noticed in only minutes by the residents of the small town we’d passed through on our way in back in November. The Geological Survey sent a team of eight to the region right away. They’d been scouring the area for a few days and had come upon Father’s ash-covered rocks spelling “HELP” which led them through the snow-ash wasteland until they found our lean-to. If Father’s half-eaten corpse hadn’t been sprawled across the ground in front of the ash-covered shelter it’s possible the geologists would have passed us by.

          We were flown out in a helicopter, straight to the nearest hospital where we spent some uncounted number of days hooked to IVs and were fed plates of real food. My first bath back in civilization was as close to bliss as I will ever come. My leg was examined by doctors, who did their best to fix the bone that healed wrong. We were interrogated by police about what had happened to Father, as well as the whereabouts of Ulsa. Each of us told the same story—the true story. Ulsa died of hypothermia hours after falling into a freezing lake during an earthquake. Father died of either blood loss, starvation, infection, or all three. Over a few days Father fed us our sister without our knowledge, using the occasion to learn how to butcher a human body, and later teaching the art to my sister and me as he carved up his own legs to sustain us. When he died we hid in the lean-to for two days with his cold corpse before hunger turned us into animals. We finally did what he had wanted all along. He became part of us. Neither Mother or Alda refused to eat him when I cut him up. Our mouths watered at the smell of human flesh. His organs were each a unique taste, a different texture requiring different preparation. And Father’s words finally resonated with us. He became more a part of us with each bite, living in us, his muscle and blood fusing into ours, strengthening us, giving us health and keeping us alive. The animal in him transformed into the animal in us. It is by sheer luck the geologists found us the same day we decided Father’s body had rotted too much to keep eating.

          During our two and a half months starving and freezing in the mountains the rest of the world had become tangled up in a war. It wasn’t a war of missiles and bombs in which people died by the thousands and entire cities were leveled in a matter of hours. Nor was it a war of ideologies or rebellions. It was slow starting, crawling on ten legs at the bottom of a well of human vulnerability. It was a war more like the subtle, invisible wars the world has carried out with no foreseeable end, like the war on drugs, the global war on terrorism, wars on information, on poverty, on culture, on illness, on anything, wars waged under titles designed to cast them under a positive light to the public eye, designed to look necessary for the well being and progression of humanity so the high levels of invasiveness will become background noise, where no amount of casualties is too high, and all victims are a menace to be handled however those calling the shots deem best. My mind is not one for analytics, so to ask me to relate in a cohesive way the patterns and events that put the world in the state it descended to is to ask too much. I am not my father. The real impact of this unseen war was virtually imperceptible at first, for it looked like things that had already been part of our world. It manifested in court rooms, on the streets, in prisons, in industry, on the internet, in homes. And like a perfect machine it pulled the right elements together at the right time to set up a domino effect that would put into motion a cataclysm. Two and a half months is not adequate time for a slow moving apocalypse to become a firestorm. When we returned to civilization we saw no changes and no reason to think the end was already implanted into the human collective, festering like a virus, conditioning its host and waiting to take everything down. I know only what I picked up in the aftermath.

          Like the earthquakes that warned of Mount Monozero’s imminent eruption, the patterns and trends that emerged around the world over long epochs, innocent and meaningless on their own but insidious when mixed, laid the groundwork for things to come, foreshadowing something beyond imagination, converging into one apocalyptic point that landed right on Father’s strategically planned foray into the wild. That excursion wasn’t an exercise, nor an opportunity for him to ready us for the future. It was an escape. His apocalypse was starting. He expected us to pick up survival along the way.

          Like I said, I don’t  know how it started, or even what one could designate as a starting point. Our access to Father’s library of evidence and documentation was prevented on account of the psychological counseling the court ordered for my mother and sister and myself. And in order for his death not to be ruled a murder, an investigation was ordered in which all his documents were seized. But what I do know is that the domino effect set up by this invisible war was just that, invisible. At least at first. One benign act here, a few technological developments there; one group of activists here, one new social policy there; one imperfect vaccine here, another technological development there; a policy reform here, a security measure there; an increase in law enforcement here, a gradual change in climate there; a social reform here, a medical advancement there… The dominoes were innumerable. Which ones fell first, I don’t know. Like Father finally seemed to realize moments before his death, there didn’t appear to be any hand guiding the pieces or designing things to go a certain way. The war was inevitable. There was no start, no single event, just a gradual progression until it became no longer negligible.

          A technological breakthrough leads to a medical breakthrough. These lead to biological technology advancements. A different technological advancement is paired with another, and another, and a series of developments are utilized together to implement the first versions of the Brainstorm, the device Mother had told us about months earlier. Alongside this is the development of nanotechnology. Simultaneously, imperfect vaccines accidentally lead to the growth of superviruses. Simultaneously, robotic technology renders jobs obsolete. Unemployment rises. Suddenly a threat, a fear, a panic. Investments redacted. Large scale reverberations. Economic collapse. Riots and poverty. Small scale violence leads to arrests, implementation of new law, increased force.

          Medical breakthroughs and policy reforms lead to implanting chips in the skin of all people signed up for a government welfare project. Chips allow tracking. New laws and increased force coupled with the chips leads to greater arrests. Riots return. Revolution is attempted. Small scale violence grows larger. Police state materializes.

          It’s a chain reaction that looks like a series of unrelated events.

          Population densities increase with technological and medical advancements. Stress on resources. Agricultural depletion. Runaway superviruses enabled by faulty vaccines and imperfect biotechnology mutate to affect non-human hosts. Insects infect crops. Virus spreads. Agriculture cannot be sustained. Global climate change unleashes a chain reaction of its own, increasing competition for natural resources, resulting in international hostilities and bloated demand and floundering supply. The rift between rich and poor widens. Even more riots. Revolution attempted. More force flushed in. Military state materializes.

          Increased poverty leads to increased reliance on government. Increased governmental power is established in times of emergency. All revolutionaries and potentially dangerous people are implanted with chips. Viruses break down the social structure. Heavy handed security in some regions endangers citizens. Conflict ensues. The Brainstorm is catching on. It’s cheap, it’s fun, it’s an alternative to the internet, which is becoming highly regulated. Millions hook up to it. It’s an escape from the world.

          And everything moved immutably forward. Prisons became overcrowded in no time. So the government built their own. Hundreds spread among the states. Resources, however, were too limited. Mass death and violence exploded around the country. Other countries saw similar outcomes after following the wrong examples. In this time of emergency and panic, marshal law was imposed. Distrust in government grew rapidly, but so did the citizens’ dependence upon it. Private property was taken by the government for security purposes, as protection against both the supervirus and the threat of revolution. But we still had the Brainstorm.

          Social taboos and government-declared public menaces were raised up as a means of fear-mongering and to unite the citizens under the spell of totalitarian control. Soon personal tracking became the norm. Even those not implanted with the chip were tracked. The Brainstorm made everyone an easily controlled unit, a connected system of users who lost touch with the horrible reality around them, their own escape from the world was in fact generated and manipulated by the monolithic entities in the world they wanted to escape. And the Brainstorm could do what the simple chip implant could not—it could more efficiently and comprehensively monitor ordinary citizens and reveal to law enforcement every single action undertaken by every single user, resulting in an astonishing blitzkrieg of arrests and trials and hopeless imprisonments for regular living. Everyone is a felon, see. The Brainstorm only made them easier to catch or control. Those not in the Brainstorm fought to stay free. Violence was encouraged by the ruling power and legal action was swift, anything necessary to quell the dissent burning in the human heart, all against a backdrop of diminishing resources, changing climate, deadly viral epidemics, starvation, clean water depletion, poverty, and unrelenting fear. The world is on fire.

          Father was right. Please excuse how badly I’ve reconstructed our history. I know very little, and have only pieced together that which I’ve been able to confirm. It is three years and one month since we returned from the mountains. I live currently with Alda and Mother in a four hundred square foot unit connected to the Third State Prison, part of a housing block sanctioned off for Unoffending Citizens. The three of us are designated as Psychological Risks because of our experience in the mountains, so we’re under 24 hour surveillance and hourly interventions. Even though the poor souls in this region infected with the supervirus are housed in a segregated village ten miles away, it seems every week a new person in our block comes down with the virus. The bio-specialists swoop in to isolate, disinfect, take them away, and to burn what little they owned. National news has been off the air for a year. Whatever we manage to hear about current world events comes from the highly regulated internet, which more than anything resembles a message board with approved posts keeping the world informed. Users of the Brainstorm rot away in their personal prisons, all while they think they’re in a fantasy world. It doesn’t sound too bad. Alda and Mother think this is better than what we had in that miserable lean-to. I’m starting to question that. And I still have an appetite for human flesh. 


The End