Whiteout

          "Record snowfall recorded in... cold front set to hang around until... storms are likely for the next three weeks..."
          No matter how long he spent flicking through the channels, each and every one kept up the relentless torrent of bad news. Ryan was being shown yet another schematic of snow forecasts when Steve walked in.
          "Anything good on?"
          "Nah, just more and more fantastic shots of the sunny skies currently blessing the whole damn country," Ryan huffed as he angrily turned off the TV. "Why do we get such bloody awful weather every winter? We're an island in the middle of the Atlantic Ocean, almost slap bang on top of the equator! Why in God's name do we even have a winter?"
          "Just to piss you off, perhaps? Jeez Ryan, I'm not a sodding meteorologist nor a geographer, I'm a doctor. Which, I think you'll find, is a lot more useful on a day-to-day basis."
          Ryan rubbed furiously at his eyes. He'd been up since five in the morning, desperately trying to free his front-end loader from the eight-foot snowdrift surrounding the house. Steve's rapid-response first aid car was also firmly installed under many metres of the stuff. "Well I'm the head of the town construction outfit, and I hereby decree that all houses up and down the Elgo Valley should be fitted with some kind of conical fixture on their roofs to prevent snow building up around them." He struggled to stand up after hours of immobility on the couch. "In fact I'll get right on that in spring!"
          "Uh-huh, sure," Steve said with a raised eyebrow. "You say that every year-"
          Suddenly the front door was almost blown clean off its hinges by a rabid cascade of pummelling knocks. Steve opened it to be confronted by Harold and Cletus, the town helicopter and 4x4 fire-fighters. They collapsed in a heap next to the nearest radiator. Steve chuckled. "I take it you couldn’t find your helicopter then, Harold?"
          "It's a t-total w-w-whiteout," Harold replied through chattering teeth, "and even if I c-could f-find it I wouldn’t even t-t-try to fly outta here!"
          "And my off-road truck is bugger-all use," Cletus chimed in. "It couldn’t even make it to the main road, all of fifty yards from here. At least we still have power here, right?"
          "Ye-" Steve started to respond but fell silent as the lights suddenly extinguished throughout the house.
          "Hey, who turned out the lights!" Ryan bellowed from the bathroom.
          Steve sighed heavily. The metal of the radiator that Harold and Cletus were clinging to was already creaking and groaning as it cooled down. "Right, everyone fetch jumpers from the walk-in wardrobe next to the laundry room. We're going to show this weather who's boss!"
          The fire-fighters picked themselves up off the floor, with Harold's teeth still doing a fair imitation of castanets, and set off to locate jumpers and to rescue Ryan from the bathroom.
          Several hours went by with nothing much happening in the house. From the outside you would declare it deserted. From the inside, you would probably declare it a time capsule. Everyone seemed to be frozen in the middle of various activities; in truth, they were now so cold that they hadn't the heart to continue their efforts. No-one was quite in danger of hypothermia, yet, but everyone was shivering and the blizzard was not letting up one bit. Several windows had broken throughout the house during strong gusts of wind, but rather than cover the holes with blankets or furniture, rooms had simply been abandoned as nature claimed more and more of the property. Finally, as midnight drew near, the four hardy friends had been forced to beat a retreat all the way to the living room with the fireplace. All doors to the room were shut and the gaps in the doorframes plugged with sheets acquired from bedrooms. Steve was hunched near the log pile, one hand poised to chuck more wood on the fire, one hand thrust under his four jumpers to prevent frostbite.
          Cletus had been fiddling with an old set of police-issue walkie-talkies that he'd recovered from a cupboard somewhere, hoping against hope that he could get them working again. The four men desperately needed help; Steve's stock of timber was almost totally depleted, Ryan's torch was draining the last of its power and slowly condemning the house to total darkness, and Harold couldn’t determine a plausibly walkable escape route from the numerous maps he had spread on the floor. They were more than forty miles from the town and every road between them and it was totally unusable as far as they knew.
          No-one knew where they were. They had been responding to a callout from a distressed farmer. His barn had collapsed under tonnes of snow with his wife inside. Cletus had been there to orchestrate the rescue, Harold had been there to survey the site from above and to act as a beacon for the ambulance, Steve had been there to administer first aid before the ambulance arrived, and Ryan had been there to assess the integrity of the farm's remaining buildings. Once the ambulance had left, the four men tried to navigate back to the town behind it but got lost in the snow. Miraculously they stumbled upon an old house owned by one of Ryan's apprentices, Patrick, and let themselves in.
          But Patrick wouldn’t own this bungalow by morning. Nature claimed it room by room as the roof succumbed to unprecedented snowfall. If any good is to be had from these events, it's that the men probably didn’t know they weren't going to see the sunrise. They were eventually found, about a week later. One by the fireplace. One next to some maps on the floor. One with his frozen fingers clutching a dead torch.
          One holding an old walkie-talkie close to his chest, buzzing with life, waiting to relay an SOS that was never issued.