Mike looked at his watch. It had been three hours and was time to wake Shannon up and get some sleep.

"Hey, Shannon, wake up" he whispered. "its your turn to take watch." He kissed her before she got up, and then crawled into his sleeping bag for the night.

Only fifteen minutes into her watch Shannon was already nervous. The wind was whistling through the trees, which happened to be tapping on the windows and walls. To make it worse Alie was talking in her sleep again. Shannon got up to grab a quick bite to eat from the kitchen.

She grabbed a bag of popcorn and slid it into the microwave. Looking out what was left of the window after being boarded up, she still saw the ominous smoke in the distance, off towards the town of Sterling. She wasn't to worried about it though, the town was a good fifty miles away and down hill through a dense forest. That was the closest town, and she knew Mike would want to take a quick trip into it tomorrow morning, but it wouldn't matter at that time. The disease apparently made the creatures vulnerable to sunlight, so they slept during the day, inside buildings.

She pulled the popcorn out of the microwave before the beeping could wake up Mike or Alie. Luckily they were both heavy sleepers. She didn't understand how they could sleep through so much. In fact, Mike had once fallen asleep on top of a fire truck during a fourth of July parade, with its sirens going, along with probably fifteen or twenty other trucks nearby, plus people yelling.

"I swear, he could probably sleep on a picket fence." She whispered, opening the popcorn bag and sitting back down. She pulled out a book to calm her nerves. Reading always helped her, and it wasn't as distracting as the MP3 that she had planned on using. After all, she needed to hear, not see. Mike had all the windows boarded up.

She finished the bag of popcorn and threw it into the fire they had going. She'd gotten through three chapters of her book already, and was close to finishing a fourth. However, she realized that she probably shouldn't have brought a vampire book, since she was trying to get away from scary stories, but she loved these books. They were hard to put down, and she loved vampires. She was, in truth, obsessed. Not in a weird way, of course. She obsessed over a lot of things, and everyone who knew her knew that. Currently, it was vampires.

CRASH

Something landed heavily outside. Shannon gasped, jumped and looked toward the sound all at the same time. She was a very skittish person, and didn't do well with loud noises. She thought about waking Mike and Alie, but changed her mind, thinking that they'd need all the sleep they could get for tomorrow. So she grabbed a shotgun, loaded it, and walked to the window near the door. She looked out, but couldn't see anything. Shannon grabbed a flashlight from the table near the door, turned it on and walked outside. She glanced around quickly but didn't see much.

She walked around to the side of the house and found the garbage can knocked over.

"Maybe it was just a raccoon…" she thought reluctantly. Then she heard the footsteps from behind her.

Mike woke up with an uneasy feeling in his gut. Something told him that there was something wrong. He looked up at the chair Shannon had been sitting in, to find it empty.

"Shit.." he thought. He grabbed his shotgun and the pistol that he had on him almost constantly during the day. Mike hated people, and didn't trust most of them. Especially in the city, which he traveled to and from quite frequently, being in college.

The place wasn't a 'bad' town by any standards, but there were always freaks. He wasn't allowed into the college with the gun of course, so he had resorted to having a lockbox in his car for when he was inside, and once he'd gotten out of the school, he'd get it out and put it into a shoulder or ankle holster, depending on whether he was sunburned, or in other pain. Mike was pretty sure his shoulder blade was pinching a nerve, because if he moved weird, or read a book for to long, it would start to hurt. Way too much.

He practically ran to the door, grabbing a flashlight in one hand, his pistol in the other and the shotgun on his back. He didn't bother waking up Alie. That would take to long. He walked outside and looked around for any sign of Shannon. He looked down and saw footprints in the dirt leading to the right. He walked over to the corner of the house and looked around.

Shannon practically jumped out of her skin when she turned around and saw someone looking around the corner at her. The flashlight fell from her hand and bounced away, the beam flying in all directions. She calmed down when she realized it was just Mike, being worried about her again.

"Jesus, you scared the shit out of me." She said.

"Yeah, well, you had me worried too. Don't go out alone anymore ok? I don't need you out here running around in the middle of the night." He was calm for something that she thought he would be panicking about. In truth, he was only just getting back to normal after being horrified when he realized that she wasn't inside.

He holstered his pistol, on his hip this time, and walked over to her. They walked back inside and sat near the fire for a while to talk. Mike wasn't in the mood for sleep at the moment, after the whole 'girlfriend gone missing while mutant, man eating people were running around' thing.

"You should have woken me up before going out. You could have been killed." He said. Shannon looked down a little ashamedly. Mike put his arm around her.

"I know," she sighed. "I wasn't sure what it was though. I didn't want to wake anyone up for nothing."

They moved closer to the fire and huddled together as they continued talking. They both realized something then.

Alaska is cold.