A Memory of Zero Degrees

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 boiled tree bark. A hundred kilos would last a single person perhaps three months if rationed strictly. But Arthur wasn't planning to merely survive. He was planning to thrive. And his body, already humming with the subtle enhancements of the system, would require far more fuel than a normal human's. The cold resistance, the increased strength, the accelerated healing it all came with a metabolic price tag. He needed to build. To fortify. To create a sanctuary that could withstand not only the killing cold but also the horrors that would emerge from the ice in the months to come.

He needed a shelter. A real one. A bunker that could laugh at minus sixty degrees and shrug off the claws of the frozen, mutated things that would start crawling out of the permafrost by Month Three. And to build something like that, he needed money. Not thousands of dollars. Hundreds of thousands.

Arthur set down the coffee cup and walked to his laptop, its screen glowing in the dim apartment. He pulled out a blank sheet of paper and a pen an anachronism in the digital age, but there was something grounding about putting ink to paper, about making his plans tangible in a world that would soon dissolve into white noise and static.

He began to write.

The list went on, each item a brick in the fortress he was building against the end of the world. But first, the money.

Arthur opened his laptop and got to work.

The Art of Burning Bridges

He started with his bank accounts. Checking. Savings. Two credit unions he'd joined on a whim years ago. He logged into each portal with the mechanical efficiency of a man closing the accounts of a dead relative which, in a very real sense, he was. The old Arthur was dead. His financial future, his credit score, his carefully curated reputation as a responsible adult all of it was being buried in an unmarked grave.

Loan applications.

He filled them out with brutal honesty and complete lies in equal measure. Income? Inflated. Employment status? Exaggerated. Purpose of loan? "Home renovation." "Debt consolidation." "Business startup." The words were meaningless. The banks' algorithms chewed on his applications and spat out approvals like candy from a broken vending machine. Twenty thousand here. Fifteen thousand there. A platinum card with a thirty thousand dollar limit. A personal line of credit for another twenty five.

He didn't stop at traditional banks. He downloaded a dozen payday loan apps, the kind that preyed on the desperate and the foolish with interest rates that bordered on criminal. He filled out each one, his fingers flying across the keyboard. The approvals came within minutes. Small amounts five hundred, a thousand, two thousand but they added up. He was harvesting the low hanging fruit of a financial system that would soon be a frozen corpse.

Next, the assets.

His SUV. A 2029 model, sleek and black, still carrying the faint new car smell even after two years of payments. It was worth maybe thirty five thousand on a good day. Arthur drove it to a seedy lot on the industrial edge of the city, a place where the salesmen wore cheap suits and asked no questions. He walked out thirty minutes later with an envelope containing twenty two thousand dollars in cash and a signed title transfer. The loan on the vehicle was someone else's problem now. In thirty days, the bank that held the lien would be a pile of ice covered rubble.

His investment portfolio. A modest collection of index funds and a handful of tech stocks he'd bought on a whim during the pandemic. Arthur liquidated it all, swallowing the early withdrawal penalties without a flinch. Twelve thousand dollars. More.

By the end of the second day, the balances across his three primary bank accounts had swelled to a combined total of just over $285,000.