Snowstorm

Shivering, I pulled my arms across my chest, wishing not for the first time that I'd brought a second fleece because clearly one wasn't enough, despite the many layers I was wearing underneath. I was absolutely freezing, though it shouldn't have surprised me much; we had long since passed the boundary for the Arctic circle, and were now well entrenched within it.

At least I had a hat. I didn't want to think about how much pain I'd be in without it.

We stuck to an ill-defined pavement, so much snow covering the ground that it was hard to tell where the pavement ended and the road began, and the blizzard really wasn't helping. Carla and Craig were bickering behind me, though it didn't sound like anything too serious so I wasn't too worried. Adjusting my goggles, I sped up my pace a little to catch up with Ermine, who seemed to be the only person who knew where we were going.

“Heading to a car park,” he said, though how he expected to find it in this weather was beyond me. I almost hoped we were going to drive the rest of the way because it felt like the cold was beginning to seep into my skin.

“And how the fecking hell are we gonna find that, then?” He laughed, not taking my tone too seriously. It was mainly because of the cold; it seemed to trigger some kind of switch inside me that was labelled 'foul mouthed temperamental bitch'. I'd managed to tone it down over the course of our journey though, thank god. Even I got annoyed when pretty much everything that came out of my mouth was a variation on a four letter word beginning with 'f'.

We finally reached a gap in the wall we'd been walking by that led to the car park. I had no idea what time it was; the sparse scattering of street lights were lit, as were the headlights of the cars passing by, but that could have been due to the blizzard more than anything. Which, I noted happily, was finally letting up to a light snowfall. The clouds above were the typical thick grey covering, tinged an icy green. They looked dark, like the sun was close to setting, but that could have been due to the orange glare of the street lights, and even if it wasn't, that narrowed it down to possibly any time between eleven at night and five in the morning.

It was Wednesday, that much I knew. We still had a week and a half to make the deadline thanks to the sheer luck that resulted in us getting this far so soon.

All we had to do now was find the right car, the one that our group's key would open. According to the instructions we had been given at the start of this, our next set of supplies would be there, and we would be required to take the car with us to the next checkpoint.