Цитаты из книги Dead of Winter

Running through the snow is like trying to run in a nightmare, where every movement is slow, sluggish.

There’s a twinge of discomfort in the back of my mind.
The twinge is louder, unignorable, like a rubber band snapping over and over in my mind.

A strange atmosphere has fallen over us. There’s shock, and horror, and anger, and betrayal. But there’s also a sense of being cleansed. As though we’ve been queasy for days, and we’ve finally thrown up the sickness from our stomachs.

My tongue won’t move. It’s weighted down by a question that’s dense and sickening and poisonous, like a coiled snake ready to sink its fangs into me.

To my right, streaks of sunrise are bleeding across the cold sky. Mountain peaks form sharp lines across the horizon, like a series of knives silhouetted against the reds and oranges of the fresh sun.

Thin, shallow breaths enter and exit through her parted lips. They feel fragile. As though they could end at any second, like a candle struggling to stay alight in a harsh wind.

The lack of sleep feels like a rough stone sliding across the inside of my skull, scraping layers off my brain.

I’ve existed in this small valley for days now, walking this very path multiple times, but the environment feels so unutterably, viciously foreign. And it’s not just alien but aggressive. As though there are wolves flanking us, just out of sight, bared teeth at our backs. As though the ground itself is preparing to crumble away, plunging us into voids that close over our screaming faces.

People grieve in different ways, I remind myself. When my father passed, I didn’t speak his name for nearly four months. Any outsider would have read that as callousness. But there was too much there. Love and anger and resentment and longing. I couldn’t explain that the words physically choked me.

The earliest traces of light flush across the horizon, leaving the mountaintops as dark, jagged knives piercing into it.

I’m walking blind, trailing my way across the mountainside like an ant wandering lost through a kitchen.

“What if she did that to Brian? She could be trying to escape.” “Realistically,” Simone says, turning back to our walk, “if she  did  kill someone, would you really want to keep her inside the cabin with us?”

I am hollowed out, like someone has taken a spoon to my insides and scraped, scraped, scraped until there is nothing left.

I’m going to die out here. The thought is circling me like a vulture.

I’ve heard that skiers who are caught in avalanches often perished because they don’t know which way to dig to get themselves out. Trapped under layers upon layers of freshly churned snow makes it nearly impossible to tell which way was up. The advice is to spit: see which way your saliva drips, then dig away from it.

The mountain range rose ahead of us and cut across the skyline like a broken knife.