And eventually I will have to stop. To sleep. To eat. To drink. To catch my breath.

I can’t walk forever. The dead can.

Knowing this should break me. It should have broken all of us long ago.

But it didn’t. Not my mother or my father. Not their parents or the generation before that.

And if I’ve learned anything surviving on my own it’s that I can take another step. That’s all I have to promise myself: one more step, and then I can worry about the one after that.

One more morning: that’s all I have to focus on.

So that’s what I do. Behind me the dead follow, the empty sound of their moaning making me nauseated and dizzy. I begin to hum, a wavering sound as the muscles in my arms and across my chest clench from the cold.

My throat’s sore, mouth parched dry, so I run my hands across the ice on the wall, bringing the drops of water to my lips to keep them from cracking. It tastes old and stale. Metallic, like blood.

A minute or an hour or a day or a week may have passed, for all I know. I just know one foot and then the other. I know the feel of the frozen wall under my half-numbed hands to keep balance. I know the feeling of my feet sliding—that moment I think I’ll catch myself just before I slam to the ground.

And I know pushing myself back up, bruises blooming on bruises. Moans chase me, the sound such a constant that it feels as necessary as breathing.

The tunnel slopes deeper underground, which makes the ice underfoot grow thicker. It starts to fill the tunnel until I’m forced to walk stooped over so I don’t hit my head on the ceiling. Keeping my balance on the slick surface becomes difficult, and finally I fall with a thud that forces the air from my lungs and sends the lantern flying.

As I lie there trying to coax myself to breathe again, shadows whisper at the edge of the feeble light.

I roll to my knees, recognizing the shapes: twisted arms, splayed fingers, gaping mouths. Eyes still open, sightless. Ice burns on my knees and palms. My teeth chatter and I have to clench my jaw hard to make them stop.

Bits of the bodies jut from the ice, frozen in time. Fingers like blades of grass coating a field, an elbow like a broken tree branch. They’re everywhere, surrounding me. My lantern’s trapped in a nook a few arm’s lengths away, and slowly, careful to avoid the snags of protruding bodies, I crawl toward it.