It had been snowing for almost three weeks before the storm finally cleared. Most houses were completely buried, bungalows all but forgotten under a thick carpet of icy cold. The majority of residents had already been recovered but a few still stubbornly remained, insistent that they had seen worse and would outlast the whole damn thing. They were mostly the elderly and the authorities didn't have the time to spare trying to persuade them that the recovery wasn't optional and so they remained. All nineteen of them.
A few days after the storm stopped recovery teams were sent to try and move the remaining nineteen to safety and, most likely, a local hospital. With temperatures well below minus fifty degrees there was almost no way they would have survived without succumbing to hypothermia.
They dug their way down to the houses that had been marked as still inhabited, searching every floor for the residents and all finding the same thing. Empty homes with snow filled rooms and wide open front doors that led to pathways dug out of the snow. Every path ended in a wall of snow and the risk of the tunnel collapsing should they try and dig the assumed corpses out was too great. The nineteen were declared dead and the recovery operation was postponed until the snow level dropped.
As the snow began to melt around two months down the line, after the failed recovery attempts something unusual was revealed. The collapsed snow paths hadn't killed the residents, they had been deliberately sunk in order to conceal several tunnels that lead to a vast underground chamber. The nineteen who stayed behind were all huddled around a fire at the far end, bundled up and roasting some kind of animal.
When the authorities checked in on them they found one person missing. The eighteen claimed there had only ever been eighteen of them and that there was a miscount, the missing person must have been airlifted out like all the others. The roasted animal was a stray deer that had found its way down to them and they'd taken advantage of that. Nothing more.
A few days after the storm stopped recovery teams were sent to try and move the remaining nineteen to safety and, most likely, a local hospital. With temperatures well below minus fifty degrees there was almost no way they would have survived without succumbing to hypothermia.
They dug their way down to the houses that had been marked as still inhabited, searching every floor for the residents and all finding the same thing. Empty homes with snow filled rooms and wide open front doors that led to pathways dug out of the snow. Every path ended in a wall of snow and the risk of the tunnel collapsing should they try and dig the assumed corpses out was too great. The nineteen were declared dead and the recovery operation was postponed until the snow level dropped.
As the snow began to melt around two months down the line, after the failed recovery attempts something unusual was revealed. The collapsed snow paths hadn't killed the residents, they had been deliberately sunk in order to conceal several tunnels that lead to a vast underground chamber. The nineteen who stayed behind were all huddled around a fire at the far end, bundled up and roasting some kind of animal.
When the authorities checked in on them they found one person missing. The eighteen claimed there had only ever been eighteen of them and that there was a miscount, the missing person must have been airlifted out like all the others. The roasted animal was a stray deer that had found its way down to them and they'd taken advantage of that. Nothing more.
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