text: You step hastily into the water—and immediately recoil your foot. It's so freezing that you feel your foot instantly go numb. You take a deep breath and hesitantly step back in, bracing yourself for the brutal cold, and this time you manage to endure it enough to move your other foot into the river. Dragging the cart behind you, you begin steadily working your way across, with the water up to your knees, and then, to your waist. With only a third of the way to go, you suddenly feel a tug on the cart. You glance over your shoulder and pull at it again, but it's stuck on something, and no matter how hard you pull, it won't budge. You...
  > You pull harder.
  With as much force as you can muster, you take the handle of the cart in both hands and pull. Slowly but surely, you can feel it starting to move, and it's dislodged so suddenly that you fall back into the freezing water. You pull yourself up and immediately begin to shiver, and every ounce of your being just wants to hurry onto dry land. Cart in tow, you drag yourself onto the opposite shore and nearly collapse, gasping from the cold. You glance over your shoulder briefly only to catch a glimpse of something twisted, pink, and bleeding attached to one of the wheels of the cart. You shut your eyes and cover your mouth in an attempt to repress a gag.
  
  
  Eventually, you bring yourself to stand up and, without looking at it, tug the fleshy substance off of the cart before throwing it into the river. You take a deep breath, still shaking from the cold, and soldier on down the road once more, pushing the cart ahead of you.
  > Next.
  Grey snow begins to fall as you make your way slowly along the road. You're not sure how long it's been. Days? Weeks? It couldn't have been months, you think, otherwise it would be getting warmer by now. At least, that's what you hope is true, for there would be no meaning in migrating south every winter if summer only grew colder. You amuse yourself with thoughts like these in an attempt to forget the twisting, empty feeling in your stomach. Impulsively, you remove your canteen from the cart and take a quick drink to quell the swelling of your throat.
  
  
  Later in the evening, you come across an abandoned gas station—actually, why do you even refer to it as abandoned? Everything in this world is abandoned and decaying, isn't it? ...There goes your brain again. You can't let it get to you. You have to hold on to the hope of survival, because without it, life isn't worth living.
  
  
  You take a deep breath and force yourself to enter the gas station. As you expected, all of the shelves have been ravaged and there's hardly anything worth keeping. You pay no mind to the open cash register and instead begin fumbling about through the mess in search of something, anything worth eating. You peer into one of the broken refrigerators and spot a sealed packet of some sort of lunch meat, hidden away in the corner. You open the door and pull it out, staring longingly at the pale hunk of long-expired, browning flesh. What do you do?