Madeleine was cold. She didn't usually get cold, but now, she was freezing. Throughout the night she tried to rest, but the cold prevented her from getting any sleep.  When she woke up she felt weak from sleep deprivation, and from the persistent cold air that was piercing through her navy blue windbreaker that she took with her on a hike the day before.

She took the hike by herself; she liked to walk a lot during the fall. As she was walking through the forest, she noticed a knobby, old pear tree. It was too late in the season for it to be flowering, and some of the pears were withering, but Madeleine's older sister made a pear pie that Madeleine loved, and she tossed a few into her black, orange-striped drawstring bag. As she sat down on one of the old, wooden park benches, she took a bite out of one of the pears that she was saving for her sister. It was hard, tart, and out-of-season, but she still enjoyed it. She looked up from her feet and saw an abundance of colorful trees outlining the other end of the field. Behind that row of trees were more trees, and if you looked behind those trees, there were still more! The trees glistened when a ray of light shone through the wispy, gray cirrus clouds and the gentle breeze. The sun's powerful glow struck the feathery clouds and made the whole sky look like a vibrant blue canvas delicately detailed with soft strokes of white paint.

As she got up from the bench and returned to the trail, a white-tailed deer stopped before her, still young enough to still have her spots. Madeleine stared into the doe's enormous dark brown eyes; the doe stared back with something that was best described as a vague warning in her large, glossy eyes. The doe's head turned back as she leapt away, displaying magnificent power in her robust, youthful strides. Madeleine was put at unease from this encounter, but she sensed that the doe knew something was about to happen. She continued on her hasty walk towards the parking lot, slowly picking up her pace. Suddenly the sky above her turned a dull gray, and the trees around her seemed darker than they were a few moments earlier. It started to rain. Madeline pulled up the hood on her windbreaker and tightly clung to the strings of her drawstring bag. A few moments later her somewhat hurried walk was interrupted by a black squirrel running out from the woods, right in front of her feet. Madeleine became nervous and started to walk a bit more hastily. She heard the wind rushing against the edge of the hood of her jacket. The wind started to howl as the rain inclined into a downpour. As she looked down at the wet mud streaming down towards the valley where her car was parked, a noisy murder of crows had started to fly in the direction the doe went, left. Madeleine looked left.

Paranoia overtook Madeleine. When something terrible happens unexpectedly, it is human nature to convince oneself that what had just happened was only a dream, and that is exactly how Madeleine felt as she saw the forest burning in the distance. One moment she was walking through the wind and rain, now, she was running for what would have been her life. As she ran her socks became full of dirty water that was collecting in puddles throughout the ground, and her shoes were coated with mud. By the time that she got to the parking lot she was so deep in shock that she didn't even feel any pain as her body stumbled against the area where the dirt trail met the parking lot's pavement. Her knees were both cut open from the concrete. A powerful burst of wind made her jacket hood fly right off of her head. She quickly composed herself, grabbed her bag, put the middle of her foot on the ground, and thrust herself forward with strength she didn't know she had. Now she was running the fastest that she'd ever ran and she couldn't even feel her lungs screaming for air. A few seconds later she reached her car. She jerked open the door of her dad's old, grayish blue corolla and thrust the key into the ignition. The car started on the second turn.

What Madeleine saw that evening would change her life. As she drove away she looked into the rear view mirror and saw a huge cloud far behind her, it was shaped like a mushroom: a surefire sign of a nuclear explosion. The strong winds She drove fast as well as cautiously, getting in a crash now might cost Madeleine her life. Some of her initial shock subsided and she started to plan. She debated whether to take the backroads or the freeway, as the backroads were generally thought of as the safest option in the case of the emergency, but how many people had been told that? Eventually, she decided to drive by the edge of Lowellville out and into the country. Now she had a semblance of a plan, all she needed to do was stay alive.

She wouldn't have admitted it to anyone, but Madeleine was deathly afraid of death, and what she was most afraid of seemed to be staring back.