Read White Out: A Post Apocalyptic Thriller for Free Online Page A

picture Bucky on a wooden spit, charring over a fire. His daydreams about eating Bucky were getting more fanatical with his growing hunger. It wasn’t that they were starving. He had plenty of canned goods, enough to last them a very long time. They never kept much meat in the house, so they had burned through some bacon and frozen hamburgers during the first few days.
    Christian tried to laugh at his own silliness, but found he didn't have it in him. Soon enough, he and Paulie would go back to bed again, to cuddle under the covers and conserve their body heat until dinnertime, if they bothered with dinner at all. They would eat lunch first, though. He'd mash up some canned carrots and corn. Paulie didn't like canned carrots (raw were fine, as long as he had some onion dip), but he was starting to understand that he didn't really have a choice in the matter anymore.
    Paulie got it , even without Christian explaining it at all.
    The kid understood the dire situation they were in, though he couldn't formulate it into his own words , not as an adult could. He could see the heavy look in Christian's eyes when his father fretted over their situation. The child knew little of pain and suffering in his limited life span, but he detected, at least on a subconscious level that it existed, and that it was closer to their doorstep than his father would have liked, and it would return again and again if things didn’t shape up soon.
    He could hear Paulie, talking to himself and clattering plastic bits together in frolic. The sound overjoyed Christian. At least we’re still acting human.
    Upstairs in the bedroom, Paulie was playing with his train set. Christian noticed that when his son played, he was staying closer and closer to the warm bed, knowing that it was a good place to be and a good place to survive. Yesterday afternoon, Christian had even found him in the bed, playing with pieces of his train beneath the covers, even though the kid couldn’t see what he was doing. Some survival mechanism in Paulie's head was telling him that he needed to conserve his body heat, so venturing about the house the way he once did was avoided.
    "Hey , Paulie?" Christian called out. His voice sounded terrible, as if he'd been swallowing nails and tacks. Sort of like Tom Waits, but without the smoky-room vibes.
    "Yeah , Daddah?" his son replied, his feet clomping towards the top of the stairs. Christian couldn't see him, but he could hear that he was getting closer. "Lunch time?" Paulie asked, already knowing the new routine that they had fallen into since his mother's absence.
    "You got it, kiddo."
    Christian stood up, feeling the cold ache in the small of his back. He'd pulled a muscle trying to shovel the driveway on day two of the storm. He almost laughed thinking about that now, how fruitless that activity ended up being in the long run. Nobody could have kept up with the total accumulation, even with a snow blower running twenty-four hours a day. It came down too fast, and it was still coming down faster still, inches and inches with every hour, around the clock, unrelenting.
    He popped open a can of carrots and poured some apple juice into a cup. He kept the bottles of juice wrapped in thick blankets, so that they would not freeze. They had a huge supply in the basement, but even that was starting to dwindle. He'd have to start melting and sterilizing snow, soon enough.
    Nothing from Paulie. No excited footsteps. Although, how often did one get excited over canned carrots and corn? Very rarely, especially in the four year old demographic.
    "You coming?" he called up the stairs again, once he had their lunches ready. He walked to the bottom of the stairs, looking up at his boy.
    Paulie looked as if he’d seen something he wasn’t supposed to see-- troubled by something that he couldn’t quite put into words, not with his limited vocabulary. Christian sensed some strange hesitance in his son, something he had never displayed before.