My name is Sawyer Osberg. I was born in Golden, Colorado, where I lived for the first few years of my life. Around high school we moved to Columbine, and there I stayed. When I graduated I decided I would take a gap year and live with my parents a little bit longer, because I had no idea what to do with my life. The gap year quickly turned into gap years. The only job I managed to get was as a FedEx delivery driver. I had a feeling that I was a waste of space, and that my parents hated me for being so pathetic.
And then the world ended.
You, whatever you are, probably didn't understand any of the things you just read. Just so you know, "Colorado" is what people used to call the stretch of icy wasteland where you'll find this document. "People" is what the frozen remains you'll find everywhere used to call themselves.
I'm writing this so I don't go insane sitting here by myself. But it's also so that you can have a record of what happened to these people. Of what happened to me.
This is my goodbye letter to the world.
I don't know what the current date is. I know it didn’t take that long for everything to happen. It’s probably very early in December or late in November. I think this started on September 1st, though I’m not sure. I lived in Denver at the time, and when it happened it didn’t seem like anything.
A few inches of snow on the ground. Big deal. Maybe a little early, a little bit of a pleasant surprise, but nothing that anyone gave a second thought to.
I don't think I even saw it in the news that day. Maybe I did, a tiny headline proclaiming snow in the middle east or something, buried under the weight of about twelve different possible wars over oil.
It would've melted pretty quick in all the places with warm weather. Maybe it didn't even have time to reach the ground. I guess if I was living there I would've noticed a few more clouds in the sky and cooler temperatures. Again, nothing to even think about.
The next day it came again. This time, a little more than an inch. A little. Some people must have been confused at the lack of warning. The weather people hadn't predicted it, not the first or second time.
I didn't care all that much. I had a life to be living. How does that slogan go?
Snow or rain or heat, I had to be making deliveries.
I barely remember any of that now. It seemed very important back then, but now it doesn't seem worth a second thought.
Anyway, it went on like that for the first week. Every day, a little bit of snow, a little bit more than yesterday, but no one paid any more attention than you usually pay attention to the weather.
What's awful is that even if everyone was thinking about it at the start, there isn't anything we could've done.
Because the snow just kept falling.
By the end of the week, there were reports in the news. At first it was just the weather channel people freaking out, all their predictions had changed. Then it bled into current events.
Snow in Miami. Snow in Tucson. Snow in Egypt. Snow in-
It sounds so stupid as I'm writing it down. Egypt, with the pyramid and the Sphinx and all that. The people that made them. Such proud and powerful beings who created such amazing monuments, brought down by some bad weather.
Now, if you watched the news often back then you might've gotten worried. I didn't watch the news. All I knew was that the snow was annoying and it was getting too cold too early. That was another thing, the temperature. And the clouds. The snow had to be coming from somewhere, so there were more clouds every day. Something you wouldn't notice unless you paid close attention was that some clouds didn't move. They didn't drift along the sky like the others.
I'd love to say there was more to it. But there wasn't. It just kept snowing. And it did not stop.
No one had any idea what was going on or what to do about it. Snow, unlike zombies or aliens or whatever else we thought would end us, is an intangible threat. You can shoot the other things. Go ahead and try to shoot the snow, see how far that gets you.
There was nothing you could do to stop the snow or make it less cold. You had the heaters and the snow plows. But everyday it got colder and the snow came down heavier.
I don't think it got to a lot of people for a long time. It was just snow. Even if you had the feeling that something was very wrong, you didn't know what to be worried about. There were still wars and other things scarier than the weather.
The first time I started thinking of it as a problem was in October. One whole month after it began. It wasn't any one thing that made me think, but a string of events. For example: I was driving down the highway when I saw a semi that had driven off a bridge section of the road. I could only see a part of the truck's pointing upwards, the rest was buried in a massive pile of snow. Then my parents, who were on a trip in Arizona, called me and said that they were getting a lot of snow. Another time I had to fight six feet of snow packed against my door to get outside, and when I made it out I found my car and most of the street buried under white. That day I stayed home and watched the news. Record lows across the world, and dropping. Consistent snowfall in the Sonoran desert, in the Sahara.
I think snow in the desert was the thing that got me. Snow at home was no big deal, no matter how much of it there was. But that made me worry, as much as some freak weather occurence in a far away country would worry me. Which wasn't as much as it should have. In my mind I still had my home, with a heater and food and electricity. Soon it would all blow over, and also I didn't have to come to work for as long as this was happening.
I should've run. I should've gone to Florida or some other place where it was warmer, where I would've had more time.
Not that it matters. I would have frozen at some point.
There isn't much else to say on it. It kept snowing. It kept getting colder.
Around October tenth I saw a news report that said something like,
Temperature in Dubai dips historically below five degrees celsius, or forty degrees fahrenheit. UN extremely concerned at this trend of rapidly decreasing temperatures.
In Denver it was already getting below zero. I hadn't been outside for three days. Now I was worried but there wasn't anything I could do.
Sometime after that news the first blizzard hit.
I've been through some bad storms. But that day, October fifteenth, I realized that the world was ending.
It started late. I felt like a kid again, cowering at home, hiding from the storm in my bed. I could hear the wind screaming all night. Somehow I managed to fall asleep for an hour or two, only to wake up at four in the morning with no power, shivering under five blankets.
Back then I didn't know that the night before was the last time in my life that the lights came on after I flipped a switch. The last time I would ever feel actual warmth.
When I got up it was quiet. I thought it was over. With a flashlight in hand I explored the house and found that I couldn't see outside the second floor windows, because there was snow packed outside them.
When I saw that it switched something on inside me. I was filled with this deep sense of pure claustrophobic terror. I wasn't thinking, I knew nothing except that I didn't want to be buried in the coffin that my home had become. It was a panic and a will to live unlike anything I have ever felt.
I tore the house up looking for all kinds of things, batteries, food, water, clothes, anything, and I packed it into this massive suitcase that I hadn't used since college. I threw on the warmest clothes I had, climbed into the attic, and broke out of it by smashing the window with a hammer. The snow was up to the attic window, so I just walked out.
The blizzard was still going. I could hear it screaming all around me. It was dark, cold, and the ski goggles I put on got a layer of snow over the lenses almost as soon as I got out. I just ran without knowing where I was going, dragging that suitcase along with me.
I shouldn't have survived. But I did. I lost the suitcase somewhere along the way but I made it.
Every person gets a certain allowance of luck in their life. Most people get it spread out across their years.
I used all of mine that night, or at least half of it, because I got very lucky the next day in the city too.
Somehow I picked the direction that led me straight to downtown Denver. The house wasn't far from the city, maybe a ten minute drive. I'd never travelled by foot. I guess the fact that everything was buried helped.
The storm let up sometime before sunrise. I kept running until I couldn't run any more. I remember it felt like my legs melted and I fell. I laid there for some time, could've been anywhere from ten minutes to an hour, I don't know.
When I got up I was surrounded by office buildings. There was a bit of light shining through the clouds, and it was reflecting off of everything.
I realized I didn't have my suitcase, and I almost laid back down to die. But instead I walked over to one of the buildings. The snow was piled up to the second floor, so I walked in through a shattered window. Everything inside was quiet. Snow was piling in through the hole in the window. There were cubicles and trash strewn about everywhere.
The first thing I did was look for food. I found a few frozen water bottles and some snacks inside the cupboard. And I remember a man in business casual, stuck in a pile of snow with half his face and his arm sticking out.
Something in me was burning despite the cold. I still wanted to live.
I climbed up a few floors, looking over everything. More scraps. More bodies.
At some point I looked outside the window. I was pretty high up. I saw flames in the street. Huge flames spewing horrible black smoke. There were people down there too, dozens, maybe hundreds of them. I could see them throwing things into the fire. All kinds of things. It was hard to tell just what, but I thought I saw everything from gasoline to TVs. A washing machine at some point. People.
They were all gathered so close around it. They were so desperate for warmth that they got close enough to fall into it.
I swear I could smell their flesh burning, even from all the way up there.
That was, I think, the worst part. Not the snow but what people tried to do to survive it, and how futile it was.
The flames burned for a while, maybe three days. Maybe long after there was no one to keep them going.
One way or another though, they all went out. Nothing was left after the second blizzard.
When that hit I was on the top floor. I thought the building would blow over. That didn't happen, but the snow rose higher.
Since then I've been here.
I've done my best with whatever I could find. I have to start a fire every time I want a drink, because all the water is frozen. The last time I did it was with a bunch of copy paper on one of the lower floors. I almost suffocated.
I haven't found anything edible for days.
Whatever fire was burning in me, keeping me alive, it's gone now.
The last time I looked outside the snow was pushing against the window, and I could hear the building's frame straining from the weight. I'm on the twelfth floor.
So.
I guess this is it.
I can't quite handle my pencil, so I think I'll have to finish it up soon.
I've been sitting in the same closet for the past couple hours. I have no strength or desire to stand.
All I hope is that I don't have a stupid expression when my face freezes.
I heard somewhere once that us humans have ten times as many receptors for cold as heat. I guess that means this is going to hurt.
I wonder which of my limbs will freeze off first?
Anyway.
I've got to get going now.
It's getting a little cold here.