My pillow has become restless. I lift my head and open my eyes, “Oh, I’m sorry, I didn’t mean to wake you” Alexia says apologetically. “What’s the matter?” I ask while letting out a shiver, the temperature has dropped drastically with the sun setting. It is now pitch black out, the only light comes from the fire.

“I’m just cold” she stammers while shivering. “Ah yes, I can see. It has gotten a lot colder recently” I ponder for a moment with what to do “ there isn’t much we can do but there are a couple things we can do with the two of us here” I state. “Yeah, what is it?” she beckons for an answer.

“First off, I hoping one of our coats are dry, put one or both on the log we’re sitting on. That’ll stop some of the heat escaping from the bottom. Also we’ll be changing our position, it’ll be a little awkward but I think we’re past that stage now” I start listing things off. We slowly stand up, then she goes and grabs our coats which both are dry now. She layers them on top of each other as instructed. When she’s done, I sit down on top of the coats. “Where am I going to sit?” she says shivering.

“Right here” I spread my legs out to make room in front of my. “What?!” she exclaims.

“You want to keep warm don’t you. Now hurry up, I’m getting cold too, but please be careful” I try and rush her. She’s hesitant but the cold chill wins her over to me. Thank goodness for her narrow straight frame, if her hips were wider it would’ve been uncomfortable for me too. She sits with a straight posture as not to lean on me, this is not how it works. I have her grab the sleeping bag’s edges to wrap around her front, then wrap my arms around her stomach. I pull her in close and hang my head over her shoulder.

“Is this too much for you?” I ask her  while staring at the fire. “No, why would you ask?” she says quietly and shy like.

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“Oh, no reason in particular” I chuckle softly as not to disturb my ribs too much. I can feel her heart speeding up, but after a little while it begins to calm down.

“How is it?” I ask, I feel a small jerk as if I woke her from a snooze. “Oh, ah, much better actually” she replies.

“Yeah, thought so. By the way, not trying to move too fast or anything but I have a feeling we’re going to need to sleep together for a while” I bring up an issue. “Uh… What do you mean by that?” she suddenly focuses.

“Pfft… Purely platonic. But as you can feel, it’s winter time and as for the sake of our health, we’re going to need each other’s body heat to keep warm” I explain. “Oh, um… I’ll think about it” she ponders off.

“Sorry luv, but there’s no way out of this” I squeeze her tighter for a moment, she just stays silent.

A few minutes pass and Alexia begins the pattern of drifting off to sleep, head falling, and jerking awake. I snicker into her shirt, when she jerks awake again I whisper into her ear “don’t worry, I can watch for now, you get some sleep. And you won’t fall as I have a hold of you, just lean on me and drift to sleep” she does just that, leans her head into the crook of my neck and doesn’t move after that.

So I’ve been theorizing, the cold is affecting us all. There are good and bad points to this, for both humans and the mutants. The disease or parasite needs heat to stay alive, even in the host body. The don’t know how to regulate heat sources other than their very own core. With this bad winter, with them just wandering around, the host body will die of hypothermia and them along with it. Would explain why we haven’t seen many recently?

This also goes for humans, if we don’t know how to survive the cold state, we’ll freeze to death. This might also increase the chance of the monsters taking risks and chancing fires, they might walk up to us even with the campfire going. We’re at an even higher risk down at the base of the cliff instead of at the top.

(Survival of the knowledgeable).