A Memory of Zero Degrees

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 it got you.

He looked up at his reflection in the window glass. The face that stared back at him was familiar, but the eyes were wrong. They were the same dark brown, but the light behind them had changed. The softness, the naive hope, the earnest desire to be liked it was gone. In its place was something flat and calculating. Something that had learned, in the most brutal way possible, that trust was a currency no one could afford in the world to come.

His reflection smiled again. A thin, mirthless curve of the lips.

"I won't make that mistake twice."

Arthur turned away from the window and walked to the center of the small room. He needed to feel this new reality. He needed to know if the return had changed anything beyond the date on his phone.

He dropped to the floor. The wooden boards creaked under his weight. He placed his palms flat ignoring the sting of the cuts and lowered himself into a push up position.

One.

He descended slowly, feeling the stretch in his chest and shoulders. It felt... easy. Too easy. In his old life, before the freeze, he could manage maybe twenty push ups before his arms started to burn. He had been an office worker, not an athlete. A man of spreadsheets and coffee, not survival.

Five. Ten. Twenty.

Arthur pushed through the numbers with a mechanical, almost detached curiosity. There was no strain. No lactic acid burn. His muscles moved with a fluid, controlled power that felt utterly foreign. He kept going. Thirty. Forty. Fifty. His breathing was even, his heart rate elevated but steady.

At seventy push ups, he stopped not because he was tired, but because he wanted to test something else. He stood up, his eyes scanning the room. They landed on the solid concrete wall next to the closet.

In his past life, punching a concrete wall would have shattered the small bones in his hand. He had known a survivor who had done it out of frustration and died of an infection a week later when the wound festered. Arthur looked at his right hand. The blood from his palms had smeared across his knuckles, making them look like they were already bruised.

He took a breath. He planted his feet. He drew his fist back.

This is going to hurt, the old Arthur screamed from some buried corner of his psyche.

The new Arthur ignored him.

He threw the punch.

His fist connected with the wall with a sound like a sledgehammer hitting stone. The impact shuddered up his arm and into his shoulder, but there was no sharp crack of breaking bone. No scream of agony. Arthur pulled his hand back and stared.

The concrete was cracked. A spiderweb of fine fissures radiated out from a small, fist shaped indentation. A thin layer of white dust coated his knuckles. He flexed his fingers. They were sore, the skin raw and bleeding slightly, but the bones beneath felt solid as iron.

A slow exhale escaped him. It was not relief. It was acknowledgment.

The system was already changing him. Strengthening the vessel.

[Physical Baseline Detected: Significant Increase in Muscular Density and Bone Durability.]

[Attribute: Strength   Enhanced.]

[Attribute: Endurance   Enhanced.]

The blue text flickered briefly, confirming what his body already knew. He was no longer the weak, naive Arthur who had been too shocked and too good to fight back when they humiliated him. He was something else now. Something being rebuilt from the ground up, forged in the memory of betrayal and the absolute, unwavering resolution to never be a victim again.

He walked back to the window and looked down at the teeming streets. The people below were laughing, arguing, living their last month of normal life. They were all potential allies. Or potential threats. Or potential meat shields.

The thought flickered through his mind and, to his own surprise, didn't horrify him. A week ago or rather, a lifetime ago the idea of using another human being as a tool would have made him physically ill. Now, it was just... a variable. An equation to be solved.

Rivan. Sera.

Their names were acid on his tongue. They were out there, somewhere in this city. Still pretending to be his best friend and his loving girlfriend. Still smiling at him, accepting his generosity, and secretly despising him for it. In thirty days, when the snow fell and the world screamed, they would expect the same Arthur. The provider. The fool.

Arthur pressed his bloody palm against the warm glass of the window, leaving a red print.

You wanted to see what I was really made of. You wanted to strip me bare and watch me freeze. You thought I was weak.

He turned away from the window as the final system notification scrolled past his vision, its cold, clinical text a perfect match for the new, frozen tundra of his soul.

[System Initialization Complete.]

[Welcome, Host. The world approaches its frozen grave. Prepare yourself, or die as worthless ice.]

"I won't be the one dying this time," Arthur whispered to the empty room. His voice was low, steady, and devoid of anything resembling the man he used to be. "This time, I'll be the one holding the knife."