Free Apocalypse Weird: Reversal (Polar Wyrd Book 1) by Jennifer Ellis Page A

a second glass of wine.
    They left a plate for Amber who threatened to shoot them once again, despite their pleas for her to calm down. The smell in the sleeping wing had gotten worse.
    “We’ll have to try to deal with it in the morning,” Soren murmured. The storm continued to rage unabated, and after they had done the dishes as best they could, they made their way back to the couches in the common room.
    “I’m not going back to my room alone,” Sasha said.
    “I thought maybe we could sleep on the couches again,” Soren replied.
    Sasha nodded. She felt the tears well and gather in her eyes. She loved the Arctic. She just didn’t want to spend the rest of what seemed likely to be her very short life here. Her mother was supposed to be on a cruise in the Caribbean this week, and her brother was a firefighter in SoCal. Were they both now dead?
    “Do you think they’ll find a solution?” she asked. “I mean we’re all blind. How are they going to fix that? And if we’re all blind, aren’t we all going to just die? Who’s going to grow food and drive buses, and perform surgeries and build houses and all those kinds of things? We’ll all end up starving, and well, dead.”
    “It’ll be the lack of bus drivers that kills us for sure,” Soren said.
    She leaned over to punch his arm, but missed entirely, and almost fell off the couch. “You know what I mean,” she replied. “Do you think it’s aliens? Aliens have made us blind, and screwed up the magnetic fields, and who knows what else.” She didn’t want to mention the thing that had talked to them. Ice. Who or what had a name like Ice? “What else could it be?”
    “I don’t know, but I’m not sure if I’m ready to go down that path. That thing in here could easily have been a human with a bad case of laryngitis. Maybe the U.S. just thinks everyone else in the world is blind. Maybe this is an invasion of sorts.”
    “But the people in the invading country wouldn’t have been able to keep this secret. They’d be outing themselves on Twitter or Facebook immediately.”
    “Unless it’s just their military running the mission, and they’ve made the rest of their population blind as a cover.”
    Sasha pulled one of the blankets that they had retrieved from their own sleeping wing over herself. If Soren was determined to believe it was a military invasion, she would go along with it. It seemed better somehow than the prospect of aliens. But only marginally.
    They went together to the side door of the storage bay to let the dogs out to do their business. Every second they stood in the doorway facing into the pelting snowstorm, waiting for the dogs, Sasha felt exposed, her mind creating a fleet of alien ships or military encampments all around them, biding their time before attacking. But the dogs returned unscathed, and Sasha tried to push away her thoughts of imminent torture and death.
    There was no need to turn out the lights in the station to go to sleep. All she saw was darkness, all around her. Every last light in the station could be blazing, although she was pretty sure Soren had said that he was turning them all off to save power for cooking and communications.
     
     
    The light played at the edges of her eyes. She must be dreaming. Her mind conjuring fantasies that she could still see. That she would once again drink in the shocking color of a fall day, the sparkle of a rippling lake, the exquisite detail of a snowflake, and the deep saturated green of a rainforest. That she would be able to stare into the eyes of a lover.
    Sasha opened her eyes. The dim glow of morning illuminated the station common room. Soren lay asleep on the couch opposite her, his chestnut brown hair a tumble of curls, and a line of dark stubble marking his sharp cheekbone. Tundra sprawled on the floor beneath his master, his paws twitching with sleep.
    She could see. She blinked. She could still see. She sat up.
    “Soren,” she called urgently. “Wake up.”
    He