In about two minutes, the lights will go off. Please stand up, take your cardboards and find a place in the room. Now lie down comfortably on the floor and close your eyes.
Cold slaps your naked face, squeezes tears from your eyes.
The freezing metal bites your flesh. Your skin temperature drops.
You replace your gloves, noticing only that your fingers have numbed slightly
Sweat trickles down your sternum and spine.
Walking in deep snow you twist on your flashlight, you sift the snow through gloved fingers
You hardly notice the frigid air pressing against your tired body and sweat-soaked clothes.
The lack of insulating fat over your muscles allows the cold to creep that much closer to your warm blood.
Hunched over in your slow search, the muscles along your neck and shoulders tighten in a pre-shivering muscle tone.
Your hands and feet begin to ache with cold. Ignoring the pain, you dig carefully through the snow, clammy chill that started around your skin has now wrapped deep into your body's core.
You're now trembling violently as your body attains its maximum shivering response.
Your muscles have cooled and tightened so dramatically that they no longer contract easily, and once contracted, they won't relax. You're locked into an ungainly, spread-armed, weak-kneed snowplow.
You're too cold to think of the beautiful night or of the friends you had meant to see.
In your panic, your balance and judgment are poor. Moments later you sail headfirst through the air and bellyflop into the snow.
You lie still. There's a dead silence in the forest, broken by the pumping of blood in your ears. Your ankle is throbbing with pain and you've hit your head. You've also lost your hat and a glove. Scratchy snow is packed down your shirt. Meltwater trickles down your neck and spine, joined soon by a thin line of blood from a small cut on your head.
Scrambling to rise, you collapse in pain, your ankle crumpling beneath you.
As you sink back into the snow, shaken, your heat begins to drain away
The pain of the cold soon pierces your ears sharply.
You check your watch: 12:58. Maybe someone will come looking for you soon. Moments later, you check again. You can't keep the numbers in your head. You'll remember little of what happens next.
Your head drops back. The snow crunches softly in your ear
Your body has abandoned the urge to warm itself by shivering.
You feel a powerful urge to urinate, the only thing you feel at all.
You've lost the ability to recognize a familiar face,
Attempting to stand, you collapse That's OK. You can crawl. It's so close.
You've crawled only a few feet. The light on your wristwatch pulses in the darkness: 5:20. Exhausted, you decide to rest your head for a moment.
When you lift it again, you're inside, lying on the floor before the woodstove. The fire throws off a red glove. First it's warm; then it's hot; then it's searing your flesh. Your clothing has caught fire.
All you know is that you're burning. You claw off your shell and pile sweater and fling them away.
But then, suddenly, you realize there's no stove, no cabin, no friends. You're lying alone in the bitter cold, naked from the waist up. You grasp your terrible misunderstanding, a whole series of misunderstandings,
At about 6:00 the next morning, your friends find you, your hand shoved into your armpit, your pulse nonexistent, your pupils unresponsive to light.
