The Dead Walk The Earth II by Luke Duffy

matter how difficult she made it for them to break free and get to her.
    There was nothing but utter silence greeting her from within the darkness. Tentatively, she crept forward and over the threshold. Her breathing was shallow and silent. Each breath quickly misted before her eyes as she exhaled and concentrated all her efforts on making no sound, but her heart was beating like a brass band in her ears. Her feet crunched against the frost that had seeped out from the open door of the freezer and everywhere she looked, the ice crystals that coated every surface sparkled back at her like a blanket of stars in a clear night sky.
    The further in she went, the colder it became. Shelves loaded with frozen vegetables and fruit flanked her on either side as she made her way along the central aisle. They were devoid of their usual colours and had become a mixture of white and cold blue as the frost had coated them along with everything it touched.
    She was soon standing before the doorway that led into the freezer compartment. Its dark opening gaped back at her forebodingly, almost daring her to step inside. She shuddered. It was not the cold that made her muscles and nerve endings twitch. It was the almost impenetrable blackness of the next room that gave absolutely no hint of what lay beyond.
    Again, Tina steeled herself and drew on every bit of her resolve to continue forward. She took in a deep breath and stepped towards the open wintry chasm. Her light flickered across more of the same that she had seen in the space behind her. A thick blanket of whiteness coating every surface. More shelves revealed more frosted goods but there was something further along filling the centre of the aisle. At first, it looked as though some of the large slabs of meat had fallen from the stacks on either side but in the back of her mind, she knew that they were not sides of frozen beef.
    “Oh my God,” she gasped involuntarily.
    What she was seeing were dozens of people. They were all sitting huddled together on the floor of the freezer compartment and perpetually frozen in time. The frost clung to their cold flesh and formed icy stalactites that hung from their features. Their skin was a multitude of greys, blues, and deep purples and some of them still remained with their eyes open and staring out at their surroundings. There were men, women, and children of all ages among the petrified heaps. They had sheltered there, hoping to get away from their attackers and had slowly frozen to death.
    Tina was unable to move. She stood in the doorway staring at the unfortunate families who had tried to save themselves but had inadvertently sealed themselves into an icy tomb. She guided the beam of her light over the faces of the dead. Their flesh glittered and the open eyes seemed to stare back at her accusingly as her torchlight caused them to sparkle.
    It was the bodies of the children that horrified her the most. Some of them could not have been much older than two or three, and they would not have understood why they were slowly freezing to death. She could almost hear their quivering, echoing voices and cries as they beseeched their parents to provide them with warmth and comfort. Their faces, frozen with the innocence of youth, looked almost peaceful in their deaths. They did not look as though they had died in pain but Tina knew that the latter stages of hypothermia were usually accompanied with a feeling of euphoria and sleepiness. It was the uncontrollable shivering and excruciating pain of the cold, creeping along their limbs and over their bodies in the earlier stages that would have been the hardest to suffer. She could only imagine how it must have been for the parents to watch their children slowly die around them when they realised that they had locked themselves inside the freezer with no way out.
    Most of the adults were virtually naked, having removed their clothing and wrapped them around the children. It had done them no good and had