Seven Roses (Haremworld)

“Come on. Give me something.” I tapped the radio and hit the scan button again.

My cell phone was dying and I hadn’t even thought to pick up my car charger because I thought I would find the cabin I was searching for long before it ran out of juice. It wouldn’t have helped anyway because the reception was so bad my GPS couldn’t even get a signal. I stared at the spinning circle indicating it was searching for satellites, but it always timed out before anything was found.

Ugh.

I cranked the heater up another notch and tried to peer through the mixture of snow and ice forming on my windshield. The wiper kept pushing it out of my line of sight, but the cold outside was making it harder to defrost as the temperature dropped. I squinted my eyes against the darkness and tried to see with the abysmal light the high beams were managing to produce in the falling snow. Mostly I just got a reflection of snow that seemed to be falling in sheets instead of flakes.

Yeah, this is bad.

The situation was going to turn from bad to dangerous very soon if I didn’t find a road sign to guide me back to civilization. I wasn’t even sure where I took a wrong turn. I tried to remember the landmarks and follow my GPS even when the signal went out, but I had made a terrible mistake somewhere along the way. The road stretched on, my eyes got weary, and the gas meter signaled that the end of my journey was coming fast.

?

?Please, just a bar. A half a bar? A quarter of a bar?” I picked up my cell phone and tried to get a signal but I was still met with nothing. I even tried flipping it into airplane mode in hopes of somehow picking up a distant service tower, but it went right back to zero bars when I told it to search for a cellular signal.

Driving around in the dark until my car ran out of gas wasn’t going to help the situation and there was nothing for miles that I could see. It certainly didn’t help that my vision was fairly obscured by the frost on my windshield and the blinding snow falling in front of me. I let my car roll to a stop and kept the engine running as I thought about my situation.

Am I the only person on this freaking road?

I pulled my coat from the bag behind me and opened my door. I just needed to get a lay of the land and see if I could somehow get a signal if I wasn’t confined to my car. My coat did little to protect me from the elements as I wandered away from my headlights with my phone in the air, searching for any sign of service. I was met with a constant row of empty bars, and every step I took plunged me further into the darkness.

“Come on...” I muttered through chattering teeth.

I heard noises in the distance and felt fear creeping up my spine. It was cold, but there were still wild animals out there, especially in the mountains. I turned towards my car and quickly ran back to safety.

Yeah, forget that.

Exiting and entering the vehicle had broken the warm seal I was enjoying from my heater, so I cranked the heater up as high as it would go and blew into my hands. After a few minutes, I could no longer see my breath so I took off my jacket and killed the headlights. It wasn’t like anyone was going to see them anyway.

What in the world am I going to do?

Somewhere in the distance, further up the mountain, was a cabin filled with some of my closest friends. It was supposed to be a party far from civilization, a party that lasted several days. My friends were probably already drunk, and rightfully so. I would have been doing the same thing if I wasn’t lost in the middle of nowhere facing the darkness and starting to panic.

I wasn’t sure how long my car would run if I just left it sitting there with the heater going, but I was certain it wasn’t going to last the night. I had no idea if the road I got lost on was traveled or if I was going to be stuck there until I eventually froze to death.

I peered out every window, looking for some sign of light—any sort of beacon to guide me towards civilization—but the only light I saw was the reflection of the moon peeking through part of a cloud and bouncing off of the snow around me. It was accumulating fast. If I hadn’t gotten started late, I would have made it to the cabin before nightfall and everything would have been fine. I silently cursed my terrible sense of direction.

“Drive until I run out of gas or sit here and hope someone shows up before I run out of gas...” I stammered angrily. “I’m too far down this road to just turn around.”

It was a risk either way. I could get ten miles out of the gas I had left if the screen on my dash was correct, but I had no idea if ten miles would put me any closer to safety. If I just stayed in one spot, I would be able to last a lot longer, but I was gambling on someone finding me. I wished I had Google to tell me what to do instead of needing to rely on my own intuition because I was certain I shouldn’t be trusted to decide my fate in a life or death situation like the one I was in.

Nature seemed to make the decision for me as I realized exactly how tired I was. The adrenaline of the situation was starting to wear off and the coffee cup in my console had been empty for a very long time.

If I was going to be forced to walk, doing it in the daylight seemed like a lot better option than trying to do it in the dark, and I seemed to remember my friends saying we might get bad weather Friday night, but the rest of the weekend was supposed to be clear. If they were right, I would only have to battle melting snow and ice when morning came. I decided that I was there for the night, or until I was found, so I tried to make myself comfortable.

“I’ve slept in a car before.” I said aimlessly. “I’ll just bundle up.”

I felt fear rising inside of me as the gas gauge dropped and finally gave out. Once the engine stopped, the heat that was blowing out of my vents was sorely missed. I had no options after that. If I was going to survive until morning, I was going to have to do it in the cold.

The fog on my windows started to frost over even worse and it got really dark when the moon disappeared behind the clouds that seemed to come together and close the crack. My car didn’t do enough to insulate me from the sounds all around me without the engine running. I could hear the whirling wind whipping against the car and I could hear the trees shaking—creaking. I could even hear the distant howls of a wolf but thankfully it sounded far, far away.

I closed my eyes and tried to force sleep, but while I was tired and drained, I was also starting to get colder. I pulled my coat around me, and then stacked a couple of shirts on top of it. My face was still cold, so I pulled a couple of shirts up over my nose, letting my breath warm them enough to dull the chill.

I felt like a natural survivalist for a moment, somehow managing to improvise with the meager supplies I had to create a cocoon of warmth. I dug into my bag again for more clothes, stuffing them in the seat around me to provide more insulation. When I got to the bottom of the bag, I felt the bottle of wine I had packed as tribute for the communal alcohol pool we planned to drink our way through before the end of the weekend. I thought about it for a couple of minutes and then pulled the bottle out.

“I always get warm when I drink...” I muttered as I started to remove the seal around the top.

I didn’t have a corkscrew and my plan seemed to be for naught as I stared at the bottle, but then I got an idea based on a video I had seen someone post on their social media page. I dug in my purse for a pen and used the flat end to start pushing on the cork from the top. It took a little effort and caused most of my covers to get tossed around as I fought with it, but I was finally able to push the cork into the liquid below.