I look around at the nothing that surrounds us. It’s dark and cold, and there’s an ache deep in my bones that feels like it’ll never shake loose.

We gather quietly at the front of the car, a meeting of the minds, I guess. The wind is briefly quiet here and the silence is absolute, the snow muffling any noise the air might carry.

“What are we going to do?” Harper asks. “Should we light the flares?”

“What for?” Kayla asks. “So the abominable snowman can rescue us?”

Brecken huffs. “We shouldn’t have come down here.”

“Well, we did,” Harper says. “We’re here now.”

Brecken gestures at the now useless car. “Might as well break out the campfire and the kumbayas because we’re not going anywhere soon.”

“We can hike out,” Josh says.

“Have you seen your leg?” I ask.

He frowns down at it. “I’m not sure we have a choice. There were a few houses about a mile back, right? We could split up. Head in both directions. Whoever gets help first sends someone for the others.”

“And if not, we’ll just freeze to death stumbling through the blizzard,” Kayla says. “Good times.”

“The gas won’t last forever, so if we don’t get out of here, we’ll freeze anyway,” Harper says.

“We need to dig out,” Brecken says. “We dig a trench and find something to ramp us back up to the road. It won’t be easy, but we can do it.”

Josh shakes his head. “No, we can’t. We need help. We aren’t in the Australian outback, we’re in Pennsylvania. I know I saw some houses not too long ago.”

“Even a mile in this will be like ten or fifteen miles,” Brecken says.

“Digging out of that ditch will be like digging a grave,” Kayla says.

Something about her tone chills me. I look around, surveying the landscape. The road we came from is only a hundred yards back. It curves sharply to the left and out of sight just past the field. I can’t even make out our tire tracks from earlier. Not from here. But I don’t remember the houses Josh is talking about. Maybe I wasn’t paying attention.

I shift on my feet, trying to think. Staying here feels exposed. Dangerous. The field on the left goes on forever, ending in a thick-looking row of trees that could be half a mile away for all I can see. What’s down the valley though? Past the snow drift on the right side of the road.

I tromp back up to the road and across it. The snow is maybe twelve inches at first, but as I walk, it gets deeper. It’s probably up to my chest in parts of the drift, but I find an opening, a little valley in the snow, that I can walk through.