All Chapters of A Memory of Zero Degrees: Chapter 1
- Chapter 10
98 chapters
Chapter 1: The Taste of Ashes and Filth (1)
The wind did not howl; it screamed. It carried with it a fusillade of ice crystals, not the gentle flakes of a Christmas card, but hard, jagged shrapnel the size of gravel that scoured the skin from bone.It was Day 47 of The Great Freeze.The world hadn't ended with a bang or a nuclear firestorm. It had ended with a whisper of dropping temperatures and the silent, relentless creep of white death. Minus forty five degrees Celsius. A temperature so profound, so absolute, that the moisture in Arthur’s exhaled breath crystallized mid air with a faint, brittle tinkle before hitting the ground. The city was a mausoleum of concrete and frozen flesh, the silence broken only by the groan of glaciers forming where streets used to be.Arthur lay face down in a drift of snow that had once been the parking lot of a derelict supermarket. The snow beneath him was no longer white; it was a deep, arterial crimson, steaming faintly as the last dregs of his body heat melted the top layer of frost. His
Chapter 2: The Taste of Ashes and Filth (2)
While she kissed him, Rivan moved behind him. He drew a serrated hunting knife. With methodical, almost bored precision, he sliced through the back of Arthur's parka, then the wool sweater beneath, then the thermal underwear. The cold air hit Arthur's spine like a second blade.Sera broke the kiss, laughing as Rivan ripped the shredded clothing from Arthur's body, leaving him bare chested and shivering. She looked down at his exposed skin, at the ribs showing through, and shook her head. "So pathetic.""Strip him," Rivan ordered.Sera knelt, her delicate fingers the same fingers Arthur used to kiss goodnight unbuckled his belt and yanked his pants down around his ankles. She pulled off his boots, then the pants, leaving him standing in nothing but his underwear in the sub zero tomb of the store. Arthur's body began to shake uncontrollably, a violent, bone jarring tremor."Please..." Arthur stammered. "Sera... I love y ""Shut up," she spat, tossing his clothes to Rivan, who began putt
Chapter 3: The Waking Wound (1)
GASP!The sound was wet, ragged, and violent like a drowning man breaking the surface of an ocean that had already filled his lungs. Arthur's body jackknifed upright in the bed, his spine curving so sharply that the vertebrae cracked in protest. His hands flew to his chest, clawing at the fabric of his shirt, searching frantically for the gaping, frozen hole where Rivan's blade had punched through his sternum and stolen the last warmth from his heart.Nothing.No blood. No torn flesh. No shards of ice crystallizing in his veins. Just the frantic, staccato drumming of his own heartbeat against his ribs, a rhythm so fast and feral it bordered on arrhythmia.He was drenched. The thin cotton of his t shirt clung to his torso like a second, sodden skin, and the pillow beneath his head was dark with sweat. The cold that cold, the minus forty five that had turned his marrow to slush was gone. In its place was the oppressive, humid warmth of a tropical morning. The air was thick with the smel
Chapter 4: The Waking Wound (2)
"Why?"The question hammered in his skull, a relentless, pounding drum."Why didn't I fight back?"He saw it again. Rivan's sneer. The MRE bag smeared with shit. Sera's cold, laughing eyes as she pulled his pants down. He had just stood there. He had pleaded. He had said "I love you" to the woman who was helping to strip him for his execution. He had been a good man. A kind man. A man who gave his food to others and believed in the best of people.And that man had died screaming, naked and alone, in the snow.Arthur unclenched his fists. He looked at the four crescent shaped wounds in each palm, wells of red filling and overflowing. The pain was sharp, clean, and real. It anchored him. It reminded him that he was alive.Good men die first, a voice whispered in the back of his mind. It was his own voice, but it sounded older, harder, and stripped of all mercy. Good men are meat. They are stepping stones for the Rivans and Seras of the world. You were a good man, Arthur. And look where
Chapter 5: The Price of Prophecy (1)
The blue holographic interface had barely finished imprinting itself onto Arthur's retinas when it flickered and reformed, cold and efficient as a surgical instrument. The text scrolled across his vision in crisp, unforgiving lines.[Tutorial Mission Available.][Objective: Accumulate 100kg of non perishable food within 24 hours.][Reward: Passive Skill Cold Resistance Lv.1 + 50 EXP.][Penalty for Failure: System Termination.]Arthur's breath misted in the warm air of his apartment. A physiological impossibility, but his body no longer adhered strictly to the old rules. System Termination. The phrase echoed in the hollow chamber of his skull. Without the system, he was just a man with terrible memories and thirty days to live. A lamb wandering toward a slaughterhouse made of ice.One hundred kilograms of food. In the world he had just left the world of frozen corpses and whispered prayers for a death that wouldn't come a single can of beans was a treasure worth killing for. He had s
Chapter 6: The Price of Prophecy (2)
Arthur stood in the parking lot, the envelope of cash heavy in his jacket pocket. Almost nine thousand dollars. In thirty days, it would be worth less than the paper it was printed on. Today, it was a ticket to survival.He walked across the lot to a wholesale club a cavernous, warehouse sized store that sold everything in quantities meant for restaurants and large families. The kind of place where you needed a membership card just to breathe the recycled air. Arthur didn't have a membership. He didn't need one. He walked through the entrance with the confident stride of a man who knew exactly what he was doing, and the teenager at the door, distracted by his phone, didn't even look up.Inside, the scale of the place was almost obscene. Pallets of goods stretched toward a distant ceiling crisscrossed with steel rafters. The air smelled of cardboard, industrial cleaner, and the faint, sweet rot of produce that had been sitting too long. In his previous life, Arthur had shopped at a cor
Chapter 7: The Price of Prophecy (3)
She glanced at him, then at the overflowing carts, and shrugged. "I'll let it slide. You look like you know what you're doing." She paused, her eyes narrowing slightly. "Or like you're about to do something crazy. Either way, not my business."Arthur said nothing. He loaded the bags into a rented van another hundred dollars he wouldn't miss and drove back to his apartment building. He made four trips up the stairs, his enhanced muscles barely registering the strain, and stacked the provisions in the center of his living room. The mountain of food was a monument to his new purpose.[Mission Progress: 115/100 kg.] [Reward Pending. Commencing Host Upgrade...]A wave of warmth washed over him. It started in his chest, just behind his sternum, and radiated outward through his limbs, his fingers, his toes. It wasn't the warmth of a fire or a blanket. It was internal, cellular. It felt like his body was being rewoven from the inside out, threaded with filaments of frost resistant steel.[Re
Chapter 8: The Hollowing (1)
The second day of Arthur's borrowed time dawned grey and humid, the sky a pale, washed out blue that promised nothing but the slow, suffocating heat of a world still clinging to its last month of normalcy. Arthur stood at the window of his apartment, a cup of black coffee growing cold in his hands though the temperature of the liquid was a distant, irrelevant sensation now, muffled by the thin layer of frost that had taken up permanent residence in his nerve endings.One hundred kilograms of food sat stacked in the corner of his living room like a monument to his new obsession. Rice. Beans. Canned goods. It looked like a fortress of sustenance, a bulwark against the coming famine. But Arthur's mind, sharpened by forty seven days of starvation and the cold clarity of near death, had already moved past it.A hundred kilos is nothing.The thought was a cold, clinical fact. In his previous life, he had watched people consume their own body weight in desperation, gnawing on leather and boi
Chapter 9: The Hollowing (2)
Arthur stared at the number on the screen. It was more money than he had ever possessed at one time in his life. It was also, in the grand scheme of what he needed to build, woefully inadequate. A proper bunker, the kind that could withstand a multi year ice age, would cost ten times that amount. He needed to cut corners, bypass bureaucracy, and move faster than the dying world around him.He reached for his phone. There were contacts he hadn't spoken to in years old associates from the construction projects he'd worked on with his foster father, a man who had built his modest fortune on concrete and steel. Arthur scrolled through the list, his thumb pausing over names that belonged to a past life.Suppliers. Fabricators. Welders.He started making calls.The Voice of the SerpentHe was navigating a rented van through the mid afternoon traffic, heading toward an industrial supply depot on the outskirts of the city, when his phone buzzed against the dashboard mount. The screen lit up w
Chapter 10: The Hollowing (3)
Sera's voice was soft, slightly breathless. There was a faint rasp to it, a huskiness that Arthur had once found alluring. Now, it sent a spike of ice through his veins. He knew that voice. He knew what it meant. He had heard it a thousand times in the dark of their shared bedroom, when she would whisper his name and pull him closer. But there was something different now. Something off."Hey, you," Arthur replied, his tone affectionate. "You okay? You sound a little out of breath.""Oh, I'm... I'm fine." There was a pause, and Arthur heard it the faint, wet sound of lips parting, a barely stifled gasp. "Just... been feeling a little under the weather today. You know, the usual."The usual. Arthur's mind, cold and analytical, filled in the blanks. He could picture the scene with horrifying clarity. Sera, sitting on Rivan's lap in the back corner booth of their favorite café, the phone pressed to her ear. Rivan's hand, hidden beneath the table, working with a practiced familiarity betwe