The cold didn't arrive screaming.It settled.
It crept into the walls, into the bones of the house, into my mouth when I slept. By the time I understood it wasn't leaving, it had already learned my name.
I counted calories the way some people used to count prayers. Not because it helped—but because counting made the waiting quieter. A can of beans split across two days. Half a sleeve of crackers meant for three. Snowmelt boiled thin and metallic, my tongue pretending it was water. My stomach argued with me constantly, a dull animal panic that never shut up, even when I pressed my hands flat against it and told myself to be patient.
Patience was easier when there were still stores to loot. When shelves weren't already bare and glass hadn't shattered inward from other hands reaching first. Now, every place worth checking had been checked. The roads were choked with abandoned cars frozen where they'd given up, doors open, trunks empty. People didn't steal anymore. There was nothing left to steal.
I learned early that hunger changes your thinking. It narrows you. Makes the world simple. Warmth. Food. Sleep. Everything else—news, rumors, even other people—became background noise.
That was before the dead ever stood up.
Back then, the only movement came from the wind dragging snow across asphalt, or the way a door might creak when the temperature dropped too fast. I flinched at sounds anyway. Everyone did. Silence had weight now. It pressed down on your ears until you imagined footsteps where there were none.
I was twenty-three when the power finally died for good.
Not flickered. Not rationed. Died.
The lights went out in the middle of boiling snow. The room dimmed into gray, and the stove clicked uselessly beneath the pot. I waited a full minute, holding my breath like that would help, then another. When nothing came back on, I sat down on the floor and laughed until my throat burned.
No heat meant no pretending anymore.
I layered clothes until my joints complained. Socks over socks. Shirts until my shoulders felt padded and wrong. I cut my hair shorter then—not for style, but because wet hair froze fast, and frostbite didn't care how you felt about mirrors. I kept it long enough to tie back. Anything longer was a liability.
I tried not to think about food while I slept. Sometimes I failed.
Dreams got mean when you were starving. They showed you things you used to have. Not feasts—nothing that generous. Just normal meals. A sandwich. Soup that steamed. The sound of chewing without counting bites. I woke up more tired than when I lay down, jaw aching like I'd been grinding my teeth through the night.
The radio stayed quiet. Not static—nothing at all. I kept it anyway, turning the dial every morning out of habit. Habit mattered. Habit was proof I hadn't slid all the way down yet.
By the third week without heat, pipes burst somewhere inside the walls. I heard the crack like a gunshot, sharp and final, followed by the slow bleed of water that never reached me. The house sighed as it broke. I wrapped duct tape around my fingers to keep them from splitting. The skin there had turned pale and angry, tiny fissures blooming like paper cuts that never healed.
I stopped thinking about spring.
Outside, the world had simplified too. Snow erased everything that once explained where you were. Streets vanished. Signs disappeared. Houses became shapes, then lumps, then just more white. I marked my routes with spray paint while I still had it—arrows, Xs, dates—but the snow swallowed those eventually. Winter didn't care about direction.
The first body I saw wasn't dead because of infection or violence.
It was a man slumped against a bus stop, hands folded in his lap like he'd decided to sit down and wait. No blood. No wounds. Just skin pulled tight over bone, eyes closed, lashes rimed with frost. He looked peaceful in a way that made me angry.
I didn't touch him. I didn't take his coat. That wasn't mercy—it was fear. I'd learned quickly that some things came with consequences you couldn't calculate.
I went home empty-handed that day and ate nothing.
The hunger sharpened after that. It stopped being dull and became precise, a blade sliding between thoughts. I started weighing risks differently. A longer walk for a maybe. A broken window for a what-if. The cold punished mistakes immediately. You slipped once, soaked a sock, and that foot was done. There were no second chances in winter.
I told myself the world was just adjusting. That this was the part before things stabilized. People had always survived winters. History proved it.
History didn't have this much snow.
On the twelfth day of nothing but melted ice and the last crumbs of rice, I found a grocery store I hadn't checked. The doors were blocked by a drift higher than my chest, the sign snapped in half and hanging by wires. Inside, it smelled like rot and old plastic. Shelves stripped bare, aisles looted down to dust.
Except the freezer section.
The power had died weeks ago, but the cold had kept things preserved. I broke open the lids with a crowbar, breath fogging the air, heart pounding like I was doing something illegal. Most of it was ruined—refrozen slush, freezer-burned shapes I couldn't trust.
Then I found the pizzas.
Three of them. Cardboard boxes soggy at the edges, labels half-peeled. I held one like it might vanish if I let go. I laughed again, softer this time, because laughing was cheaper than crying.
I cooked one over a fire that night, the crust burning black, cheese running greasy and wrong. I ate it anyway. I burned my mouth. I didn't care. For the first time in weeks, my stomach went quiet.
That night, the cold cracked louder than before.
I woke to a sound I hadn't heard yet—a dragging scrape, slow and deliberate, somewhere outside. Not wind. Not settling ice.
I lay still, breath shallow, listening.
The scrape came again.
Then stopped.
I told myself it was nothing. I told myself a lot of things back then. Winter was good at teaching you how fragile lies were.
I didn't know yet what was coming. Not really.I just knew the cold had stopped being the worst thing.
Hunger came first.The rest learned from it.