Part 1

They soon realized that they had no chance of surviving on the surface for any length of time. Those first three brave souls would prove that point with their lives. Or were they brave? Perhaps they were simply stupid. Suicidal. Ignoring obvious risk to find hope for us all. The coming generations would see them as heroes anyway, for the stories that were told portrayed them as such.

At any rate, those three souls only showed us the danger, demonstrated our helplessness. We were lost. In our underground room, our cellar, we had barely the food to last a few weeks, and no protective equipment. None that would have any effect on the "trihelix". That horrible man-made virus that attacks human DNA, ripping it open and then adding another strand. An incompatible strand that our bodies don't understand. Its effect is amazingly rapid, like cancer spreading. If cancer knew all our weaknesses. If cancer was intelligent.

The three souls who had left the cellar to find life in the despair of the blizzard couldn't walk ten yards in the deep snow without their bodies attacking themselves, beginning at the lungs and finding its way to the rest of the body in under a minute. Once they felt it, they barely had time to turn around before collapsing, unable to move because all their blood oxygen had been compromised. Our only hope was some kind of mask, an oxygen tank, something to protect us from breathing the putrid air that was laced with our destruction.

That hope could be thirty yards away. We must be some of the luckiest humans on this planet, to have found our cellar in time, and also to be so near to "Scuba Pete's" scuba shop. No one knew what had happened to Scuba Pete, he had disappeared days before anyone heard about the attack. But perhaps we could honor him in some way, if we were able to make it to his store and survive. But even if we make it to the store, it's surely locked. Would anyone have enough strength to break a window after making the journey through our diseased environment? Would anyone be alive?

The obvious obstacle is the snow. It covers the ground so thick that mailboxes are almost hidden. How tall is that? It must be three, four feet? Insane. Impossible. It never snows here, that's why it's a year round resort. Yet somehow, with our minimal knowledge of this frozen white powder, we have to get past it; or rather, get over it. Obviously we aren't equipped for snowshoes, and few of us even have warm clothes other than wetsuits, and those are all back in our houses, surely filled with disease by now. Still we must somehow make our way past thirty yards of snow while holding our breath.

What are our resources? Some cases of canned food, several gallon jugs of water, chemical packets to keep warm for a few hours, the gas in our heater, and the radio and television, both constantly scanning the channels, playing for us everything they find. Playing for us nothing. Who had built this place? Hadn't it always been here, since we were all children? I remember playing nearby on the beach, my mother talking about how it was ridiculous for it to be so near to a tourist hot spot, this shack, this target for graffiti, this grey symbol of despair and ugliness. Oh mother, how wrong you were. This is now my home, until we break free.

Maybe the tin cans could be used to fashion some sort of snowshoe. Green beans under the toes, peaches under the heel, cans ripped apart as if the trihelix itself had invaded. A few strips of precious clothing, a now useless sarong, covering the sharp edges and attaching the cans to a pair of sneakers.

Useless. All in vain. These new "fruit shoes" as they were lovingly called, were almost as bad as regular sneakers in the snow. We barely pulled him back in before he lost his held breath, gasping for life. And every time we open the door, we let a little more of the infection in. Luckily this strain thrives in the cold, so if we gather around the heater it might die before reaching us. No one is sick yet.

How did the weather turn so cold? It is a fruitless question, one we cannot possibly hope to answer. And even if we knew the answer through some divine stroke of genius, we have no way of changing it. We are but a few people, who have lived the cushy lives reserved for the rich, near a beach, always in the sun, never having to survive, only to live.

Of course! Why didn't we see it before? The cardboard cases that hold all these cans of food. They are nice and flat. They could be laid upon the snow. There are certainly plenty of them to make a path from here to Scuba Pete's. But how? How could anyone possibly hold their breath long enough to lay cardboard down all the way to our salvation?