Solitary (chapter 1)

Chapter 1: Trapped

Cold. All you think of is the cold. You think about how it increasingly nibbles away your clothes, until you feel like you're sitting naked on a sheet of ice. You fear taking your fingers out of your jacket, you are afraid of losing them to the cold. The cold is all around you, and you are in an isolated trap.

It was our last snowboarding trip of the season, in the middle of January. Everything was fine, it seemed we had the whole mountain to ourselves. I had lost my breath when we were pretty far from the resort, so my three friends and I hiked to a nearby cave that someone had carved out of the ice. Josh and Shaun cracked open a couple of beers and offered one each to Sarah and I.

Soon, we all had enough beers in our systems to not want to go back to the resort anytime in the near future. Thats when we heard the rumbling. It was hard to hear at first but it got louder and it got closer with each passing second. Shaun got up to look for the cause of the noise. By the time he got near the mouth of the cave the rumbling was right above us, and a thick sheet of snow coverd the mouth of the cave. We were trapped.

Sarah went into hysterics, which made everything worse.

"What are we going to do? We cant get out! We're gonna die!" Sarah yelled as she started pacing around the small cave.

She sat back down and started mumbling incoherently, rocking back and forth. Josh lit an emergency candle we had brought with us in case we got stuck somewhere dark. We could all feel him going into his usual power trip, feeling the weakness of the group, and needing to feed on it. Before Josh could get a word in, Shaun stepped up,

"We need to just sit down, drink a beer and calm down."

I loved him, I really did. I wished I could tell him. Especially since there was such a high possiblity that one of us would die in the next 48 hours. Thinking about that really started to scare me. The thought of any of us dying, made me lose it a little bit. I sat down and started crying. Shaun came by my side to comfort me.

After a few minutes I pushed Shaun away, not wanting him to know that I was in paradise when he held me. I picked a small corner in the very back of the cave to sit and nurse my beer. I noticed I had that I had been biting my lip quite hard, as blood ran down my chin. Shaun came back to my side with a white cotton rag from his pack. He gently pressed it to my lip for a little while to stop the bleeding.

"I'm sorry about that. I didnt realize I was doing it. I didnt mean to be a problem" I said to Shaun.

"You're never a problem to me." Shaun replied thoughfully.

"Dont lie." I snapped back at him.

"Never." He said, making himself comfortable next to me.