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The snow crawler came to a shuddering stop.
Brooks checked that his suit was set to meet the ambient air temperature – a balmy -30C – and put his helmet on. It was lightweight, the front a curved glass panel that was as clear as air.
He opened the door.
The wind blasted past, but despite its strength there was nothing to blow. Antarctica received very little snowfall, and what had come down recently had been long since swept away.
He felt cool, but not cold, his suit working well.
He walked forward. He was only at the outskirts, and he had a ways left to go.
Structures still stood in what had once been a town. Many were half-buried, the snow that had fallen in the previous decades having built up to the point of turning to a dense firn that resisted the scouring winds.
He walked on, observing.
Some of the houses were buried up the first floor on some sides, out of the wind. Others were already partially submerged in ice.
The onset had been rapid, and more intense than they had anticipated. He wondered if, millions of years ago, when this land had first frozen, if the earliest ice had formed as quickly.
There was not the slightest sign of life. What that was Earthly could live in such a place?
Certainly not humans, not with the conditions that had come after the Ringfall. Too much damage had been done across the equator for help to come. Things were bad everywhere, but short of the devastation areas themselves, none had been worse off than here.
It had been the follow-up debris de-orbiting down upon them that had slowly wrecked their oasis – that and the fimbulwinter that had brought the cold.
He looked out at an empty field. He could recognize that it had once been a park. He could recall days in his youth of running across the grass that grew in the summer months. That building, just beyond, had been a restaurant.
Without even thinking about it he found himself crossing the field, walking in what he imagined were his own footsteps – though the ground was now a meter below him, under firn and ice.
The park seemed smaller than he remembered, and he reached the restaurant. The windows were still intact, but he knew a way to get in.
Going around back, he found that the rising ice had made it easier to climb the dumpster and reach the second floor window that had been broken. Even the sharp edges of the glass had been broken and worn down, by hundreds of feet that had come in here, seeking temporary shelter, or hoping to find some kind of food or fuel.
He went in.
The floor tiles were more faded than in his memory. All of it was smaller than he remembered. But he’d been a young man the last time he’d come in here.
Walking deeper, he knew this had once been an apartment for the couple that had run the restaurant.
There was little sign of them. The man, Adam, had died early on. His wife had survived a few more years, but then she too had died of hypothermia after the primary reactors for the town had to be shut down.
Her body had long since been taken away and given a proper burial, and their personal effects had all been taken or lost.
Anything that could be burned had been pried up, and there wasn’t even a bed left on the metal frame.
On the floor, he saw just one empty image frame, the screen that had projected various photographs having long-since lost power.
Following the path he’d taken when, he too, had been scavenging, he arrived in the kitchen below.
There, on the tile. He could still see the dark stain – or at least a trace of it. It had not been scoured clean in all these decades.
Kneeling, he brushed a hand over it.
Blood had spilled here, from a knife into the side of a man who had been trying to kill him for a bag with three dented emergency rations and a single mostly-empty fuel cannister.
The first time he’d ever killed a man.
He hadn’t even known it at the time. His knife had struck deep as the man was raising a brick to crush his skull.
The man had tumbled back into the burners, knocking one off its seating, it had crashed to the floor, and he could still see it there, at an angle to the wall.
After that, he’d run and Brooks had let him. He didn’t want to hurt anyone, but he’d been scrounging, and he was good at it most of the time, but this man had come from another town further towards the mountains that were even colder, whose power had been knocked out by falling debris long before. Perhaps the last of a dying town.
He’d run off into the snow, and no one had ever seen him again. Years later, a drone scan had found him. He’d bled out, losing his strength in the cold until he’d gone to sleep and never awoken.
Like so many others, except he might not have faced that fate if Brooks had not stabbed him, no matter how justified it had been.
He left the store, though not running as fast as he did when he’d only been sixteen.
Other Terrestrial 