PART ONE
–The Great Desolation–

Greg Walker opened his eyes and stared up at a sky of dead gray iron.

For a few seconds, he could feel nothing, and wondered vaguely if he had been paralyzed. Or perhaps he was dead. But as some inscrutable division of time eked by, he became aware of things. A madly shrieking wind. Brittle snowflakes descending from those dead skies. And pain. It was nebulous and thin, more the memory of pain than of pain itself, but he felt it. This still didn't quite answer the question of whether or not he was dead.

Greg tried to speak.

Something like a wheeze came out of him, and that seemed to invoke slightly more pain, though it was still distant and weak. The dead didn't feel pain...or they always felt pain, maybe. But this pale imitation of suffering didn't seem to hold up on either end of that spectrum. Greg tried to focus, to get some sensation going in his body, to do something.

He said, "Am I dead?"

The words actually escaped his lips this time, and he could hear his own voice. Something seemed to snap inside of him, like a heavy switch being thrown, and suddenly the world sharpened into focus, and then a powerful pulse of what might have been anger surged through him. He jerked, or tried to at least, and felt his body move.

"I'm not dead," he growled, and became slowly aware of the fact that he was immensely cold. Perhaps colder than he had ever been in his life.

Greg sat up and began shivering.

He surveyed an icebound wasteland.

Where in the hell was he?

Cognition was slow, but his brain gradually began to come back online. Upright, he had to get upright. Greg had goals to complete, things to do, even if right now he didn't know what those things might be. His brain kept catching as it restarted, like a lighter that wouldn't light or an engine that wouldn't turn over. Warm. He needed warm. Above all else. Or he was going to die. He began shivering more violently as his body awoke.

Okay, he had to think through this.

How to achieve warmth?

Fire was the first word that came to mind. He had to make a fire. Images of wood and tinder drifted with an aching lethargy through his brain as he sat there freezing in the snow. Somewhere ahead of him, he thought he could see a body of water and stands of trees.

"Get up," Greg whispered through gritted, chattering teeth. "Get up."

He willed his muscles to move, his body to respond, and finally it did. He got slowly, painfully to his feet. Looking down at himself, he saw that some of his ballistics armor was missing, and his uniform was torn in places, and stained with blood. He remembered...a Pelican. He had been riding a Pelican down from orbit. And there had been others. And…

No. He could remember later.

Memory was a luxury right now. At this very moment, he needed to focus the whole of his being on getting to shelter and making a fire. Because already his senses were feeding him more information. The daylight was rapidly bleeding from the skies, the snow was falling faster and harder, the winds were shrieking more powerfully. A storm was on rapid approach, his brain whispered to him, and if he didn't get inside, he would die. He would fall back asleep and he would freeze to death, nothing but a solid lump buried in a snowdrift.

No. He wasn't going to let that happen to himself.

Greg groaned as the cold hit him harder, sapping what precious little energy he had left in his tanks. He did a three sixty, forcing his feet, his legs to move, and scoped out the immediate area. As he faced the opposite direction, he saw it. Shelter. Survival. Salvation. A rise in the land with a dark opening that was already fading fast from view in the pallid, dwindling light. A few dead trees sat in between him and his destination, lonely and miserable, like skeletal hands reaching through the earth to the heavens beyond.

Trees. Wood. Wood burned.

So that was half the equation of fire solved, but how to start it? He'd have to figure that out later. Already, the prospect of walking to the cave and gathering whatever he could find was looking like one of the most difficult things he'd ever had to do in his life. His whole body still felt largely unresponsive and was throbbing in dull, aching agony now. When (if) he managed to get warm, he was in for a world of hurt.

As he started walking, the world tipped and swayed as his sense of balance came loose, and he screamed weakly, losing his footing. Greg went sprawling in the snow and fresh jags of pain echoed through his frame as he hit the ground.

"Come on, come on!" he cried, almost begged, as he waited for the pain to subside again. Once it was back down to a more tolerable level, he forced himself back up. Breathing heavily, waiting for the world to stop spinning, he leaned forward, hands resting on his knees. Thoughts wanted to come, questions that desperately needed answering, but he pushed them away with a weakening strength of will. Fire first.

Straightening up again, Greg took a few deep breaths. He made himself stand up straight and wasted a precious few moments banishing the pain from his mind as best he could. There had been a lot of pain in his life, a tremendous amount of it really, and he had practice at storing it elsewhere when the time called for it. And now was most certainly one of those times. He closed his eyes as he took those breaths, and when he opened them again, the world seemed more focused. More there. He felt more grounded to reality.

"I can do this," he whispered, and set off again.

This time he didn't fall when he stumbled. The cave could be no more than twenty five or thirty meters away from his present location, but it didn't seem to grow closer as he walked through the frigid snowfall, kicking his way through drifts of snow. Something dark lay on the ground ahead of him. He paused as he reached it and saw it for what it was: a stick. Greg stared at it for a few seconds, and was alarmed to realize that he'd nearly forgotten his intended task. Good lord, his head was a mess right now. If he didn't get to that cave and start a fire soon, he really would die. He was beginning to realize that his skull ached badly.

The pain and the cold were hard to think through, but he forced himself onward anyway, kneeling and scooping up the stick. There were more, he saw, gathered around a dead tree to his left. He marched over to it, focusing on each raise of his leg, each step, each simple action. It was all he could manage in this moment. One stick became two. Two became four. Four became ten, as well as a little collection of bark.

He continued walking, picking up everything he saw that might help him, and the skies grew dimmer. The snow continued to fall harder. The winds were roaring now, not merely shrieking. The storm was nearly upon him. Greg was shivering so hard he kept having to stop and pick up sticks that he was dropping, costing him precious seconds. But he needed these sticks, this meager supply of fuel, if he was to survive the coming night.

Nearer to the cave, he saw a big branch that had been dislodged by the winds perhaps. That might very well be his salvation. He paused for a few seconds, considering if maybe he could somehow grab it as well, but surmised that he would have to come back for it. Which would have to be fast because the light was almost gone now. Instead, he finished loading his arms down with whatever other tinder and kindling he could find, and continued his slow, agonizing march to the dark socket in the earth that might save his life tonight.

As he reached the cave and then entered it, Greg felt his body wanting to give out. Theoretically he could just collapse and make the fire a few feet deeper in. But no, he had no idea how long the night here was, wherever this was, and he needed that big branch. Dumping everything he'd gathered on the floor of the cave, Greg forced himself to turn around and march back out into the frozen wasteland. He could just barely make out the branch. It couldn't have been more than three meters away, but walking there felt like crossing a field.

Reaching the branch, he knelt and grabbed it, as well as a few other sticks and twigs that had been dislodged by the winds. For a few seconds, he was tempted to continue his search, but as he glanced back over his shoulder and realized that he almost couldn't see the cave anymore, even this close to it, a bolt of cold fear shot through him and he gave up that notion immediately. Instead, he turned and stomped through the snow as fast as he could. When he reached the cave once more, the sun had gone and he was left in almost total darkness.

Swallowing the primal fear that was rising within him, trying to find its way out and push him over the edge into a full-blown panic, Greg stood completely still a few feet into the cave and closed his eyes. It was a practically useless gesture, but it seemed to help focus him at least. Centering himself, he asked the next question: How to start the fire? If he didn't figure that out, he was dead. Supplies, he remembered at once, he had supplies on him!

Or he should, anyway.

He'd come down in full combat gear, which had a lot of pockets. His thoughts still felt slippery and muddled, but he made his hands work, his fingers going through his varied pockets one by one after dropping the big branch. His assault rifle was gone, obviously. And as he had that thought, one hand fell to his hip, where his pistol should be, but it was gone too. Holster and all. His medical kit was missing as well.

A lot of his pockets had torn open or ripped in places, letting the supplies out. But he still had two things on him, two glorious things: a flare and a flashlight. Breathing heavily still, his lungs burning with the frigid air, teeth chattering madly, Greg activated the flashlight. The lens was cracked, and the beam was weak and flickered several times, but it was light, and more than enough to show him the interior of the cave.

For a few seconds, he felt a new terror come to him.

Things lived in caves, sometimes.

But his pale beam of weak light revealed that this cave wasn't particularly deep. He could see the back of it, and there didn't seem to be any side tunnels or big niches where something could hide. Rocks were scattered along the ground. That got his mind, and his body, moving again. He'd need rocks to build the fire. Greg moved deeper into the cave, spending a few minutes moving his meager supply of wood and bark and rocks back into the deepest part of it, the farthest point away from the cold and the snow.

There was actually a little niche, he saw, near the back. The wall jutted out a few feet and provided a small space. His head throbbing, his whole body aching dully, the cold gnawing away at him, Greg dropped to his hands and knees and, with shaking hands, assembled his fire. Placing the rocks in a rough circle, he then piled the twigs and sticks and bark in that circlet of stone. And then came the next part, the one he wasn't looking forward to. He was going to have to break the branch up. Getting back to his feet, he planted one boot firmly on the branch, close to the thin end, and then reached down, got a good grip, and pulled.

He broke off about a quarter of it and set it in the pile, then repeated this process twice more. It was harder the second time, and harder still the third, requiring several moments of grunting and pained tugging before finally the branch snapped. Once that was done, Greg settled himself into the niche and then spent a few more moments assembling the pile as best he could, going for as long of a burn as possible, because he could tell that he was going to pass out, and for a good long while, and soon. His head was swimming now, his movements growing sluggish. Figuring that the pile of kindling was about as good as it was going to get, he grabbed his flare and broke it open. Electric, flickering blue light filled the cave and temporarily blinded him. He stuck it down into the pile and began the process of getting the fire going.

Luck finally found him. It didn't take all that long.

The flames grew into existence and immediately a wave of warmth began to wash over him. Greg released a deep sigh of relief and leaned back against the wall. Already, he was beginning to drift off. Briefly, he wondered what would happen if he had a concussion or a brain bleed or a cracked skull, or if the fire went out.

Well, the answer at least was simple.

He would die.

If that was the case, then these might be his last few moments of life. As far as dying moments went, he supposed this wasn't too bad. Although he was alone and in pain in a cave on an alien world, unsure of how he had gotten there or what had happened, after that grueling walk through the freezing snowstorm, just sitting down in front of a fire felt so good that he almost didn't mind the fact that he could die soon.

And then Greg Walker fell asleep.