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Suddenly, his stomach soured. What the hell had the kid seen?
    "What is it, Paulie? Are you okay?"
    " Guy look sick."
    "What guy?"
    "Guy outside. He look sick, so, so sick," Paulie said. He was always worried whenever Mommy or Daddy caught a cold, perpetually asking them if they were sick or not. He still equated sickness with death. Sick animals died, and so did sick people, the boy presumed.
    Christian could hardly perceive the floating, tingling feeling in his stomach as he ran up the stairs, as if in a dream, into the bedroom. He stared at his second floor window, where a man with jet-black hair had crammed his face against the icy window. He couldn't make out his identity and didn't recognize the man at all.
    He looked as if he’d been dead awhile.
    Why hadn’t they heard him? Had he banged on the window? Had he cried out for somebody to let him in? Perhaps he hadn’t the strength to do that, perishing only inches away from salvation. Christian rewound his memory through the day, wondering if he’d heard a strange noise that he’d given no credence to. Nothing came to mind. They would have heard something for sure, especially with no electricity creating noise through the house. The only sounds that filled their house were he and Paulie’s voices.
    "Daddah?" Paulie asked vaguely, grabbing tight to his father's hand. They stood in silence for several minutes, staring at the rigid shape of the dead man against the window, obscured by the frost both inside and outside the window pane. Christian had no idea what to say, and even less what to do.
    Christian felt his whole body surge as t he man's left eye opened with a pop, vacant and lifeless and peering into their home from the white abyss.
     

 
    Chapter Four
     
    They settled on embarking from the third floor window, like two burglars escaping after a big heist. Two days earlier, when Tony first spoke of leaving, they would have left from the second floor window, but that option was no longer viable. A raging easterly wind had pushed all the snow up against the building, creating a snowy slide that dipped deep down into the parking lot where the cars were wholly covered. It tapered off after the lot, and that was where Tony would put his muscle into propelling them, if they didn’t sink to their deaths immediately. Annie wasn’t sure which way it would go, even still.
    Tony insisted upon starting off with a bang, propelling himself and Annie (not to mention their homemade sled-slash-raft) off the edge of the wide steel sill of the pried open window. Instantaneously, they gathered momentum, though he gave an extra push as they transferred into the chowdery white abyss.
    Annie gasped as they hit the outside air, not from the shock of their descent from the snowy incline, but from the icy chill of forty below zero temperatures, as indicated in their final temperature reading before their exit. The wind had let up some earlier in the morning, but it returned gust by gust, minute by minute.
    Throughout the morning, while they fed themselves the remaining bits of food they could uncover in coworkers’ desks, Annie tried to talk Tony out of leaving. She thought they could wait one more day, but he wasn't having it, not with the heat and food supplies fully cashed out. There was an underlying excitement in his actions-- in his every gesture and sweeping declaration of their game plan-- that came from this deadly challenge. Annie wasn't sure if it was the element of protection he was providing her, or if it was the perilous nature of their oncoming journey. She suspected it might be a little bit of both.
    Annie clutched the edges of the wheelbarrow’s plasticized hull, trying to look straight ahead. As they slid down the hill, she prayed that the contraption would stay together. She kept picturing Charlie Brown inside of her mind’s eye; putting together a go-cart and having it break down into rubble on its maiden voyage. It was unfair to Tony, but it made her feel