DAY ONE HUNDRED AND TWENTY
NEW YEAR’S DAY
It was three in the morning. The world was unexpectedly bright. The sky had been clear for much of the preceding day and there’d been no noticeable increase in cloud cover through the night so far. The temperature under the starry sky had dropped to sub-zero again, ensuring that every corpse in the vicinity – maybe even the entire country – had again frozen solid, their immediate threat neutralised. The moon was three-quarters full, and in the darkness of everything else, it appeared lit up. In turn, the light it cast was reflected equally brilliantly off the remaining snow and fresh ice. It was almost as if dawn had broken several hours too soon.
The van raced across the beautiful, alien-looking landscape at the kind of speeds people hadn’t dar
