Cryogenian

In the past few days, there have been moments when I've felt an intense and extreme coldness around me. I will be working and then suddenly my skin will break out in goose flesh and I'll start shivering.

And then yesterday, I had another dream with the man in the gray suit.

I stood in a snowy field. It was nearly blinding - the snow went on for as far as I could see. There was no end to it. I knew I should have been freezing, but instead I felt nothing.

The man in the gray suit was beside me. "Where are we now?" I asked him.

"Eight hundred and fifty million years ago," he said. "It is a period called the Cryogenian, when ice and snow covered nearly the entirety of the world."

"Another extinction?"

"A birth," he said. "That's what it means. Cryogenian, a cold birth."

I looked around and then back at him. "Is this a dream or have we actually gone into the past? It feels too dreamlike to be real."

"You refer to this as the past, but that indicates that time moves," he said. "Time does not move. Time stands still. It is you who moves."

"Why are we here?" I asked.

"You will be visited by the one who gave birth to the cold," he said. "Your actions in isolating yourself have resulted in you becoming a target."

"What do I do?"

"You must protect yourself. You must use the gun."

"But it doesn't even have any bullets."

The man turned to me and I averted by eyes from his, not wanting to look into them. "It is a singular gun. You must use singular bullets. You cannot buy them. You must make them."

He gestured to the fields of snow and suddenly I knew what to do. I started wading in the snow, moving it around, trying to find places where it was harder and colder. I took scoops of it and formed it into my hands. I packed the snow together more and more and it grew smaller and smaller, going from the size of my head to my hands to finally the size of a pebble. I didn't know how I did it, how I put so much mass into it, but I did. I shaped the piece of snow until it looked the way I thought it should look.

And then I held up the bullet.

It was not a bullet made of snow, not anymore. It had become as hard as crystal, as sharp as ice.

It was a bullet made of cold.

The man turned to me then and said, "Do not listen to his songs. Do not wait for him to stop. Do not hesitate."

He said something else, but I don't remember what it was. All I remember was that when I woke up, I held in my hand a bullet so cold it burned.