Excerpt: Frostbite

“By the time you'll see this, I'll probably be dead.”

The young man staring at the camera frowns and rakes a hand through his blond hair. He looks stressed out and uncomfortable. There are lines of worry in his face that shouldn't be here and he looks like he hasn't slept enough in the past few days. “Wow, how's that for a morbid opening. I'm sorry. Still, it's true.” He sighs with a shudder. “Mom, dad, Corey, Philip, Sven, anyone who happens to see this... I hope you get to see this. It's a madhouse upstairs. I'm not quite sure what is happening up there, but I sure as fuck am not going to walk up that stairs to find out.”

A clanking noise resounds, and the young man looks over his shoulder nervously. A hand grabs the camera and turns it to look at the rest of the room – it is just your ordinary cellar turned into a study. “This has been my home for the past two months,” he says. Grey walls, no windows. There is a desk, a state-of-the-art computer, hi-tech gadgets scattered over the table, a refrigerator that was undoubtedly filled with caffeinated beverages, and a poster on the wall that showed the skyline over the capital of his hometown Levinski. “I didn't figure when I got the lease on this place that this is the room I'll probably die in. I don't have enough supplies to last down here, and going up there is totally out of the question.”

The young man takes the camera again and turns it to show his face. It would be a kind of handsome face, if his green-grey eyes hadn't been bloodshot and he wasn't so obviously stressed out and frightened. “For the ones just tuning in – I'm not sure if my signal can even /get/ to the dial up in Levinski, but let's humor ourselves – if you are watching this, whoever you might be... my name is Remy Demetz. I'm currently in a cellar in the middle of the city of Zeniak that's getting bombed to shit. And I have no idea how to get out of here.”