My head hurts. My eyes still ache from...wherever I was.

Henry's in the hospital. They said that they might have to amputate his arm. When they brought him into surgery, he begged me not to leave him alone, but I couldn't stay. I couldn't.

Holly's dead.

I don't understand. I don't understand what happened at all.

She told me everything she knew about it. About the Cold Boy. She said that we were going to take the fight to it. "How?" I asked.

"It has minions," she said. "They call themselves the Children of the Cold. They can't be hurt by bullets, but I know what probably will hurt them." She brought out bottles, half-filled with alcohol, the tops stuffed with rags. "Molotov cocktails," she said. "It's time to fight ice with fire."

And so we made a plan. And we waited. We waited for the enemy to appear. "I see one," Henry finally said. He had the binoculars, he was our lookout. They were coming for us, but we could see them when they did.

I don't even know his last name. They asked me at the hospital, but I didn't know. His arm looked pale and dead. "Advanced stages of frostbite," they said.

"I see one," Henry said. "It's time," Holly said. We packed our Molotov cocktails and the lighters Holly had handed out (mine was bright green) and stepped outside into the cold. Henry pointed and we saw him: a small child on the edge of the quad, kneeling down, his eyes staring at us. They were black.

"Now what?" I asked.

"We follow him," Holly said. "They'll lead us to more, perhaps a lair of some sort. And then we burn it down. We see how they like fire."

We followed the black-eyed child. I'm sure he knew we were following him. He didn't care. I swear I heard him laughing sometimes, laughing at our naivete. At our stupidity.

He was leading us to a trap. Of course he was. Perhaps Holly and Henry were so consumed with destroying the enemy that they didn't see it. Perhaps they saw it and decided to go anyway. (I don't know why they were so gung-ho about it, but Holly said that it was personal for Henry, that some member of his family had been taken by the Cold Boy. One of the black-eyed children might have been his.)

So we followed the child and he led us to a building on the edge of campus. We followed him like fools. Holly went first and then Henry and I was last, holding my Molotov cocktail out like it would protect me. Inside was a corridor and then a set of double doors. Holly and Henry pushed them open and walked through and I turned around to check behind me. Then I walked through the double doors.

And I found myself someplace cold and white. All around me was a blizzard and snow began to cover my feet and legs. I tried walking forward, but just moving was hard. I finally realized that I still had my Molotov cocktail in my hand, so I lit it and watched it burst into flames, then dropped it on the ground. It created a small fire that warmed me for a moment before the flames completely died. I tried looking around, but all I could see was whiteness. A blank white nothingness.

I closed my eyes and felt my heat seeping away from me. I opened them and found myself back in the corridor. Holly and Henry were gone. I ran forward looking for them.

I found them a few rooms later. Henry said that he had been waiting for them. I didn't have to ask who. The room was covered in a thin layer of frost. Holly was lying face down on the floor. I turned her over to see how she was, then backed away and vomited. Her eyes had been frozen solid, then shattered. Her mouth was frozen in a scream.

I called 911. Henry was crying in pain, his right arm motionless and pale. I couldn't look at Holly's body, so I looked around the room. There was a whiteboard on the wall. Someone had written on it. Someone had written:

JE T'ATTENDS DANS
LE COEUR D'HIVER
LA COUR D'HIVER

I erased it before the paramedics got there.

Out of Jail

I'm going to ignore the last post. I'm not going to wonder how Claire knew my password or hacked into my account. (Though I can probably stop keeping my name hidden - everyone who reads this now knows it's "John," but I guess that's fairly nondescript.)

Professor Holly Sachs drove me back to the college campus, then parked next to a darkened building. She got out and started walking towards the building. I figured I had to follow her. The man in the truck bed also got out - he looked like he was in his late thirties with dark blonde hair, his chin covered in stubble. He barely looked at me as he followed the Professor.

Professor Sachs led me into a darkened auditorium, then flicked on the lights, illuminating everything. It looked sort of like the auditorium in my dreams, which kind of freaked me out.

"It's okay," Professor Sachs said, seeing the fear on my face. "They're not going to chase you here. They like to hunt their game slowly."

"Game?" I said. "Is that what I am?"

"Yes," she said. "I'm not going to sugarcoat anything. You are food for them. That's all. Anything they promised you, anything they said, it's a lie."

I looked at her and then at the blonde man. He was standing with folded arms behind her. "So what's going on? I mean, you obviously knew more than you were telling from before."

Professor Sachs sighed. "Yes," she said. "After Max...after Professor Gibbs was kicked out, some men came to the college. Men from the government. But they were from some agency I had never heard of, something that started with an S. They confiscated all of Max's research, even the notebook of drawings that had gotten him into trouble." She sat down and right then, I noticed she looked really tired. "Since there was obviously something about his research that was right, I decided to find him and talk to him. But when I found him...there were these kids following him. I thought they were hoodlums at first, like they were mugging him. But then I saw their eyes."

"They were black," I said. "They had black eyes?"

"Yes," she said. "Completely. And Max, well, he had obviously been prepared for them, because he pulled out a gun and shot a few of them. I drove away so quickly. But I called 911. Even if I had been hallucinating, I called 911. No bodies were found."

"Bullets don't kill them," I said.

"No," she said. "After that, well, I went through a lot of research. I found a lot of things that didn't make sense. I met Henry over there and he told me about some things. About what had happened to him and what he had seen. And then we began to get visits from them."

"The kids?" I asked.

"Yes," she said. "They would show up outside class. We could always spot them, even when they didn't have black eyes. They never mingled with the other students. They wore jackets and hoods, even in warm weather. And they were cold to the touch." She paused and then went on. "One day, they attacked me. Luckily, Henry was there. They tried to bring me back to wherever they came from, but he knocked them back. That's when we decided to bring the fight to them."

I glanced at Henry. He looked like he could smash some heads. "And the fire hose?" I said, turning back to Professor Sachs.

"Got that at an auction," she said. "Bullets don't kill them. Don't know what does, actually. But they are cold and the thing they serve makes things freeze. So we shoot them with water and it slows them down at least. The hose gives the added element in that it'll knock them down." She paused again and looked at me. "So now we end of the Q&A part and come to the real question: what are you going to do now?"

"I..." I looked down at my hands. "I don't know."

"You could run," Professor Sachs said. "That doesn't always work, but it may. Or you could stay and help us." She held out her hand, much like Claire did before. "You could fight."

"You don't have to choose right away," she said, pulling her hand back. "But the longer you wait, the more likely it is you'll be taken by them. I don't know how many there are -- I've only seen about five at a time. But I know they don't stop. Not until you dead or one of them."

So there were my only choices: be like them or die, run or fight.

It started to snow. Clumps of white snow covered the ground.

I was going for a walk, looking for a place to eat that was still open. I thought that I was going to have to finally resort to the old stereotype and eat Chinese food on Christmas Day.

And then it began to snow.

I looked behind me. No snow. I looked far ahead of me. The ground was devoid of anything resembling snow. It hadn't even been that cold. But now, right where I was standing, it was freezing. It was snowing.

I ran. And when I stopped, I looked behind me and the snow was melting. But then it began to snow where I was standing. So I ran again. And whenever I stopped, it started to snow.

An old joke that my grandfather had told rose unbidden in my mind: I've never seen snow, but I've seen snue. What's snue? I don't know, what's new with you?

What's new with me? Well, apparently, I'm being followed around by the embodiment of entropy and he looks like a little boy and he likes to sing songs and he's fucking around with by making it snow wherever I am. That's what's new.

I came to my apartment building. And outside, standing on the steps, was Claire.

"He's giving you a chance," she said. "He's showing you the signs."

"I don't want to be cold," I said, trying not to shiver.

"You already are," she said. "You are cold and alone. But you don't have to be alone." She held out her hand. "You can be like me. Be like us."

"Us?" I looked around and saw that the street was no longer empty of people. There were kids standing on the corner, standing in a circle. There were five of them, the youngest maybe eight, the oldest fourteen. They looked at me with black eyes.

"We are the Children of the Cold," Claire said. "With his touch, we were born again. We're never alone now. And we never will be. Join us."

It was so tempting. She was beautiful standing there in the snow. I wanted to take her hand. But there was something nagging at me. Nagging at my mind. I said, "Or what?"

Claire pulled back her hand. "He will take you no matter what. I was merely offering the easier solution. The one where you won't have to be alone. If you refuse this, he will take you and you will be alone forever. Alone and cold."

"Why?" I asked.

"It is what he is," Claire said. "No more questions. We need your answer. Will you come with us?"

I hesitated. If what she said was true, this was the better option. But I hated being forced to do anything. Dangle a carrot in front of me and I will turn the other way. Say "Do this or die" and I will refuse.

"No," I said.

Claire frowned. "I'm sorry you said that. I thought we would be together." She nodded her head and the black-eyed children started walking over. Some of them smiled and I saw that their teeth were white and sharp.

Then there was a loud screech and the bright light of headlights blinded me for a second before a voice yelled out my name. "Get it!" I looked behind me and there was a truck, a white truck with what looked like a fire hose in the back. A man was holding onto the fire hose. "Get it!" the voice shouted again.

The black-eyed children ran towards me. The man in the truck bed turned on the fire hose and it knocked them over like bowling pins. I ran towards the truck, but then felt someone grabbing my arm and turned. It was Claire. Her touch was colder than anything I've ever felt before. But then a hand grabbed by shirt collar and pulled me into the truck and Claire had to let go.

I turned to look at the driver and got another shock. It was Professor Holly Sachs. "Sorry I lied to you, kid," she said. "I had to make sure you weren't working with them."

"Them," I said and turned back. As we sped away, I could see Claire looking at me, her eyes as black as coal.