The December Protocol

The train stopped hours ago. He has a thermos of hot tea and a government-issue coat. He knows why we’re here.

**December 14th. 22:47**

It’s the silence that’s wrong. Not the absence of noise—the wind is a constant, physical presence, a high-pitched scream that presses against the windows. It’s the silence underneath it. The familiar, rhythmic clatter of the wheels, the gentle sway of the carriage, the low hum of the HVAC system—all gone. We are a dead thing on the tracks, a metal casket flash-frozen in the middle of nowhere, Wyoming. The emergency lights, a sickly yellow, flickered for about an hour before giving up. Now, the only light comes from the pale, ghostly glow of phone screens. Mine is at 14%. I’ve switched it to airplane mode, power-saving on, brightness at its absolute minimum. Not to save the battery for a call—there’s been no signal for hours—but to have this. A tiny rectangle of light to write by. To document.

The official announcement came three hours ago, a crackle of static from the intercom before the main power died. A snowdrift on the line ahead. Indefinite delay. The conductor’s voice was thin, trying for reassuring and landing on frightened. People panicked, at first. A surge of nervous energy, voices rising, a baby starting to wail. But the cold has a way of leeching energy, of replacing panic with a slow, creeping dread. The heating died with the power. Every breath I take is a cloud of white vapor. I can feel the chill seeping up from the floor, through the thin soles of my boots. My fingers are stiff, clumsy on the screen.

I keep touching the pocket of my jeans. A nervous tic. The drive is there, a small, hard rectangle of plastic and metal. It feels both impossibly heavy and terrifyingly fragile. Sometimes I press my thumb against the denim, feeling its sharp corner, just to make sure it hasn't somehow dematerialized. It’s the only thing that matters. Everything—leaving my apartment with one bag, wiping my personal laptop, buying a train ticket with cash under a fake name—it all comes down to this tiny object. The December Protocol. That’s what the file directory was named. A bland, bureaucratic title for something monstrous. Evidence. Proof. My death warrant, if I’m caught.

And I think I’m about to be caught.

He’s three rows ahead, on the opposite side of the aisle. I noticed him when we boarded in Cheyenne. You notice a man like that. He’s not overtly threatening. He’s middle-aged, maybe late forties, with tidy graying hair and a face that’s utterly forgettable in its symmetry. He’s wearing a dark, tailored wool coat that looks too expensive for a cross-country train trip. While everyone else was wrestling with roller bags and backpacks, he had only a slim, hard-sided leather briefcase. He moves with a quiet economy, a lack of wasted motion that screams training. While the rest of us are bundled in our coats, shivering, he seems… comfortable. Unbothered. He hasn’t even looked at his phone. He’s been reading a paperback book since the train stopped, using a pen-sized reading light he produced from an inner pocket. The man came prepared.

I keep my own head down, pretending to be scrolling through old photos, but I’m watching his reflection in the dark window. It’s distorted, layered over the swirling chaos of the snow outside, but I can see him turn a page. Calm. Methodical. Government. I don’t know how I know, but I do. It’s a certainty that has settled deep in my gut, cold and hard as a block of ice. This is not a random blizzard. This is not a snowdrift on the line. This is a net, and the string has just been pulled. The train, the storm, all of it—it’s a deliberately created container. A trap designed to isolate one person from a hundred. Me.

The baby, a few rows behind me, has started crying again. A thin, miserable wail. The mother shushes, her voice a low, desperate murmur. A man across from me, who introduced himself as Mark to anyone who would listen earlier, groans loudly. 'Can’t they shut that thing up?' He’s a salesman, something in agricultural tech, and he’s been complaining about his missed connection in Salt Lake City for the past hour. People like Mark think the world is an inconvenience arranged specifically for them. They have no idea what real trouble is. Real trouble is a man who reads a book while the world freezes around him, because he’s the one who brought the cold.

I have to keep writing. If they find me, if they take the drive, this record is all that’s left. My name is Leo Caine. I was a junior data analyst for the Office of Federal Logistics. I copied a file from a secure server a little over forty-eight hours ago. And I think the man in the wool coat is here to kill me for it.

**December 15th. 01:12**

The last of the phone screens have started to die. One by one, they blink out, plunging their small corners of the carriage into absolute blackness. It changes the atmosphere. The darkness feels heavier, the cold more profound. My own screen feels like a beacon, dangerously bright, even at its lowest setting. I’ve taken to shielding it with my coat, creating a small tent of fabric to hide the glow. The air in here is foul. Stale, recycled oxygen, thick with the metallic tang of fear.

Mark, the salesman, tried to start a rebellion about an hour ago. He stood up, his silhouette a bulky shape against the faint light from the far end of the car, and declared he was going to 'find the damn conductor' and 'get some answers.' His voice was loud, performative. A few people mumbled in agreement. It was the man in the coat who stopped him. He didn’t raise his voice. He didn’t even stand up.

'That's an inadvisable course of action,' he said. The words cut through the low murmuring, perfectly calm and clear. He clicked off his reading light, and the sudden absence of that tiny pinpoint of illumination made everyone turn towards him. 'The vestibules between cars will be frozen. The doors are likely iced over. You risk exposure to temperatures well below freezing, disorientation in whiteout conditions, and injury. The crew is aware of our situation. The most logical and safest thing we can do is conserve body heat and wait for instruction.'

He didn't present it as an opinion. He stated it as a series of facts. Risk, temperature, conditions. It was a verbalized risk assessment matrix. Mark blustered for a moment, something about 'not just sitting here,' but the certainty had gone out of his voice. The man in the coat had sucked all the oxygen out of his little mutiny. Mark sat back down, defeated. And in that moment, the man—I’m calling him Morrison in my head, he looks like a Morrison—established himself as the alpha. Not through force, but through a calm, unassailable logic that played on everyone’s fear. He was the only adult in the room.

A few minutes after that, he moved. I tracked his reflection in the window. He opened his briefcase. The clicks of the latches were unnervingly loud in the quiet car. I tensed, my hand instinctively going to my pocket. The drive. What was he getting? A weapon? A radio? It was worse. It was mundane. He pulled out a large, stainless steel thermos and two paper cups. He walked down the aisle, his steps sure-footed in the dark, and stopped by the family with the crying baby. I couldn't hear the words, only a low murmur. He handed the mother one of the cups. The baby’s crying subsided a few moments later, replaced by small, gulping sounds. He gave the other cup to an elderly woman shivering across the aisle from them. Then he returned to his seat, his job done. An act of kindness. A strategic distribution of resources.

He was building trust. Making himself essential. And it terrified me more than if he’d pulled a gun. A man with a gun is a simple problem. A man who wins hearts and minds is a far more dangerous adversary. He's making them see him as a provider, a protector. So when the time comes, when he moves on me, who will they believe? The helpful, prepared gentleman, or the paranoid kid huddled in the corner? He's isolating me without laying a hand on me. Every gesture of goodwill he extends to them is a brick in the wall he’s building around me.

A young woman, a student from the looks of her—hoodie, worn backpack, textbook on her lap—is watching him too. I’ve seen her glance over at him a few times. Her name is Linda. I heard her talking to her mom on the phone before the signal cut out, something about getting home to Portland for the holidays. She isn't buying his performance either. Her expression, when she looks at him, is sharp. Analytical. There’s no fear in it. Only calculation. Maybe I’m not as alone as I thought.

My battery is at 9%. I need to conserve it. The cold is getting worse. It’s a deep, aching cold that feels like it’s settling in my bones. I keep flexing my toes in my boots to make sure I can still feel them. Morrison has his book open again, the small light a circle of defiance in the oppressive dark. He looks patient. He has all the time in the world. He knows the storm he created will last exactly as long as he needs it to.

**December 15th. 04:30**

Sleep is impossible. Every time I drift off, my mind conjures images from the files: satellite photos, redacted memos, transportation manifests for materials that shouldn't exist. The numbers, the logistics of it all. The December Protocol wasn't just a name; it was a plan. A contingency for sealing off a population center under the guise of a natural disaster or a public health crisis. The documents didn't specify where. They were a playbook. And this train, this storm… it feels like a dress rehearsal. A field test. With me as the target.

Morrison made his move about an hour ago. Not against me, not directly. He walked down the aisle, a quiet shadow, and stopped by my seat. My heart hammered against my ribs, a frantic bird trying to escape its cage. My hand was clenched so tight around the data drive in my pocket that my knuckles ached. I kept my eyes closed, feigning sleep, my breathing deliberately slow and even.

He didn't touch me. He just stood there for a long moment. I could feel his presence, a palpable weight in the air beside me. I could smell the faint, clean scent of his wool coat and something else, something antiseptic. He was studying me. I knew it. Assessing. Was I asleep? Was I a threat? The silence stretched on, thin and taut. Then he moved on, continuing his slow patrol of the car. He was checking on everyone. A shepherd tending his flock. A wolf counting the sheep.

He stopped by Linda's seat. The student. I cracked my eyelids just enough to see. His back was to me. He leaned down and said something to her, his voice too low to carry. She had been pretending to sleep too, I think. She sat up slowly. He offered her his thermos. I saw the faint plume of steam rise from the cup he poured for her. She hesitated for a fraction of a second, then took it. She nodded, her face unreadable in the gloom. They spoke for a few minutes. A quiet, murmuring conversation that felt more like an interrogation than a wellness check.

He was testing her. Probing. Trying to see if she was an ally, an unknown variable, or just another passenger. And she was playing the part, answering his questions, accepting his 'kindness.' It was a masterclass in manipulation on his part, and a terrifyingly good performance on hers. She was holding her own. When he finally moved on and returned to his seat, she sank back against the window, the paper cup held loosely in her hands. She didn't drink from it.

That was the signal. It was a silent, mutual acknowledgment of the truth. We both saw him for what he was. The tea wasn't just tea; it was a test of compliance. And she had passed by accepting, and then confirmed her dissent by not drinking.

The cold is becoming a serious problem. The frost on the inside of the windows is thick now, an opaque sheet of ice. Condensation from our breathing freezes on our coats and hair. The family with the baby is huddled together under a pile of every coat they own. Mark is silent, all his bluster frozen out of him. The train groans periodically, a long, low shuddering sound as the metal contracts further. It sounds like a dying beast. I’m starting to feel a dull ache in my joints that has nothing to do with my tense posture. It’s the kind of deep cold that you can’t just shake off. It’s systemic.

I need to talk to Linda. I need to know what he said to her. But I can't make a move. Morrison is awake. He's not reading anymore. He’s just sitting there in the dark, watching. His stillness is more unnerving than any action. It’s the stillness of a predator that knows its prey is trapped and has nowhere left to run. My battery is at 5%. This might be my last entry for a while. If I go dark, it’s not because I’ve given up. It’s because I’m saving the last of my power for when it really matters. For now, all I can do is watch him watch me, and pray for a dawn that might never come.

**December 15th. 07:19**

A pale, gray light has begun to seep into the car. It’s not sunrise, not yet. It’s the diffuse, shadowless light of a world buried in snow. The blizzard hasn’t stopped, but the wind has lost some of its manic fury. Through a small patch I scraped clear on the window, all I can see is white. An endless, undulating landscape of it. The train is buried up to its windows. We are well and truly stuck.

The dim light reveals the state of the car. It’s a mess. Trash is starting to pile up. Faces are pale and drawn, smudged with dirt and fatigue. Everyone looks older. The shared misery has forged a strange, temporary community, but it’s a fragile one, held together by fear. And at the center of that community, a calm, organizing principle: Morrison.

He’s been coordinating things since the light returned. He had people with any remaining battery on their phones use the light to search for food in the luggage. He organized a collection. The haul was meager: a few bags of chips, some granola bars, a half-eaten box of cookies. He’s rationing it, giving the largest portions to the child and the elderly woman. He’s a natural leader. People are looking to him now, not the train crew, who have been conspicuously absent. He’s made himself indispensable. He owns this car.

I got my chance to speak with Linda about thirty minutes ago. It was a calculated risk. Morrison was at the far end of the car, talking to Mark and another man, carefully explaining why trying to dig ourselves out was a futile and dangerous idea. 'The snow is packed like concrete,' he was saying, his voice a low, reasonable hum. 'You'll expend more calories than you'll gain in progress.'

I moved two rows back, to where Linda was sitting, under the pretense of looking for a fallen glove. I knelt in the aisle, my back to Morrison.

'His name is Morrison,' I whispered, my voice hoarse. 'Or that's what I'm calling him.'

She didn’t look at me. She kept her eyes fixed on the back of the seat in front of her. 'He asked me what I was studying,' she murmured, her voice barely audible. 'Political science. He smiled when I said that. Not a nice smile.'

'What else?'

'He asked where I was from, where I was going. If I was traveling alone. Standard questions, but the way he asked them… it was like he was filling out a form. He wanted to know if I was a variable he needed to account for.'

My fingers fumbled with the imaginary glove on the floor. 'Did you drink the tea?'

A tiny shake of her head. 'Poured it out on the floor when he wasn't looking. It smelled… off. Too sweet. Maybe nothing. Maybe a sedative.'

My blood ran cold. A sedative. To neutralize potential threats? To make his eventual job easier? The thought was paralyzing. This was beyond just capturing me. This was a meticulously planned operation. The drive in my pocket felt like a burning coal.

'His coat,' she whispered, 'it’s a modified DSA field agent jacket. Department of Special Analysis. My uncle used to work for them before he retired. It's a defunct agency. Or, it's supposed to be.'

Defunct. A ghost agency. The kind that does the things the official agencies can't put on paper. The kind that makes people disappear.

'He's here for someone,' I said, the words feeling like shards of glass in my throat.

'Or something,' she corrected quietly. She still hadn't looked at me, but I felt her gaze, her intense focus. 'He keeps watching you. You pretend to be asleep, but you're not fooling him. He knows you're aware.'

I finally looked up from the floor, my eyes meeting hers for a brief second. In them, I saw a reflection of my own fear, but also a sharp, defiant intelligence. She knew. She didn't know the specifics, but she knew the shape of the thing we were trapped in.

'We need to watch him,' I said. 'Take shifts. One of us is always awake, always has eyes on him.'

'Already am,' she replied. 'Your turn to sleep. You look like hell.'

I nodded, a sharp, jerky motion, and retreated to my seat. My heart was pounding. An alliance. A fragile one, based on nothing more than a shared glance and a whispered conversation. But it was something. A single point of light in an overwhelming darkness. I huddled in my seat, pulling my coat tight, and closed my eyes. For the first time, sleep felt like a possibility, however remote. Because I wasn't the only one watching the wolf anymore.

**December 15th. 14:00**

I slept. A deep, dreamless, leaden sleep that lasted for hours. Waking up was a slow, painful process. The cold was the first thing I registered, a physical entity that had worked its way deep into my muscles. Every joint screamed in protest as I shifted. The second thing was Linda’s eyes on me from across the aisle. She gave a subtle, almost imperceptible nod. All quiet. My turn.

The atmosphere in the car has deteriorated. The initial shock has worn off, replaced by a grim, sullen lethargy. The meager food supply is gone. The child is quiet, no longer crying, just staring with wide, vacant eyes. It’s the silence of exhaustion. Hope is a finite resource, and it’s running low. But Morrison seems to have an endless supply of calm. He’s been teaching Mark and another man how to play a complicated card game with a deck he produced from his briefcase. A distraction. A way to manage morale. He is the picture of control.

I’m trying to piece it all together. The defunct agency. The 'protocol.' The engineered blizzard. This isn't just about retrieving the drive. The scale of this operation is immense. Shutting down a major rail line, manipulating a weather system—or at least, piggybacking on one with surgical precision. It's an incredible expense. It means the data on this drive is more critical than I ever imagined. It’s not just evidence of overreach; it must be proof of something active. Something ongoing. Something worth this.

I’ve been watching Morrison’s hands. They are clean, nails perfectly manicured. They move with deliberation, whether he’s shuffling cards or adjusting his collar. These are not the hands of a man who does clumsy work. He is a professional. And a professional wouldn’t be sent alone if there was any chance of failure. He’s not here to negotiate. He’s here to close a loop. The other people in this car are just noise, collateral. But he can’t make a move in front of them. Not yet. He needs a pretense. He needs the illusion of a normal crisis to hold until his exit strategy arrives.

Linda and I have developed a silent language. A slight tap of a finger on her knee means 'he’s moving.' A glance towards the front of the car means 'he’s talking to the crew'—we assume there is crew up there, somewhere. A hand covering the mouth means 'be careful, he’s watching us.' For the last hour, her hand has not moved from her mouth. He knows we’ve connected. The conversation in the aisle, however brief, did not go unnoticed. He’s not focusing on just me anymore. His attention is now split between the two of us. He sees her not as a passenger, but as my co-conspirator. He has put her in the circle of threat with me. The guilt of that is a physical weight in my stomach. I brought this on her.

The light outside is beginning to fade again. Another night is coming. The temperature will drop even further. Morrison just retrieved a handful of chemical hand-warmer packets from his briefcase and passed them out. Another gesture of benevolent control. He gave one to me, his eyes meeting mine as he dropped it into my lap. His expression was blank, but the message was clear. *I am your provider. I am your salvation. I am in charge of your survival.* I haven't activated it. I don’t trust it. It sits on my lap, a small, benign-looking packet that feels like a threat.

What is his endgame? He can't stay here forever. A train going missing, even in a blizzard, will eventually trigger a massive response. His window is limited. He's waiting for something. A specific signal? A specific time? Or is the arrival of his support the entire point? No messy takedown in a crowded station. Just a clean extraction from an isolated, contained environment where the witnesses are too cold and scared and grateful to their 'savior' to ask the right questions.

The drive. I can't let him get it. Linda doesn't know about it, and I can't tell her. The less she knows, the safer she is. Plausible deniability. If he takes me, she’s just a student who was in the wrong place at the wrong time. But I need a contingency. If he makes a move, I need to get the drive away from my body. I’ve been looking around the car. A rip in the seat cushion? Under the floor heating vent? No, he’d find it. It needs to go to someone else. It would have to be her. A silent handoff in the dark. A terrible burden to place on a stranger. But it might be the only way for the information to survive, even if I don't.

My phone is dead. The screen is a black mirror. This journal is now a purely mental exercise. A way to keep my thoughts straight. The final entry will have to be remembered, not written.

**December 15th. 19:38 (Final Entry. Mental Record.)**

Darkness again. A complete and total absence of light. No more phones. No more faint glow from the horizon. Just the sound of the wind, which has picked up its mournful howl again, and the sound of fifty people breathing in a frozen metal box. The cold is a living thing now. It has teeth. I can’t feel my feet, and my fingers are clumsy, useless things. Linda is huddled across the aisle. I can’t see her, but I know she’s there. We are two poles of awareness in the suffocating black.

Morrison is moving. I can hear the faint rustle of his wool coat, the soft, sure tread of his shoes in the aisle. He is a creature of the dark. He’s making his rounds. A quiet word here, a reassuring touch on a shoulder there. He’s shoring up his flock. Keeping the narrative straight. *We are all in this together. Help is coming. I will keep you safe.* The lies are as thick as the frost on the windows.

He paused beside my seat again. Longer this time. I didn’t feign sleep. I sat perfectly still, my eyes open, staring into the blackness where I knew he stood. I wanted him to know I was awake. I wanted him to know that I knew. The air between us was electric with unspoken truth. He is the hunter. I am the prey. The game is in its final stages. He breathed out, a slow, deliberate exhalation, a cloud of vapor I could feel more than see. And then he moved on.

Minutes or hours pass. Time has lost its meaning. There is only the cold, and the dark, and the waiting. And then, a new sound. It starts low, a vibration felt through the floor of the train more than heard. A deep, rhythmic thrumming that slowly detaches itself from the howl of the wind. It grows steadily. A pattern emerges from the noise.

*Whump. Whump. Whump.*

It’s a sound that doesn’t belong in a blizzard. It’s the sound of machinery. Of power. A wave of confused, hopeful murmuring ripples through the car. Someone near the front sobs with relief. 'They found us,' a woman whispers. 'It’s a rescue.' Mark lets out a whoop of joy, a cracked, hoarse sound. The energy in the car shifts. The long night is over. Salvation has arrived.

But I am not relieved. I am frozen with a dread colder than any blizzard. I am searching the darkness, trying to find Morrison’s face. The thrumming grows louder, closer. It’s not one, but multiple sources. Heavy-lift helicopters. The kind they use for military operations, not civilian rescue. They are not landing. They are hovering. Searchlights cut through the darkness, sweeping across the snow, then slicing through the windows of our car, blindingly bright. The interior is lit up in a series of stark, flashing tableaus. Faces, pale and ecstatic. The crying mother, smiling through tears. Mark, pounding his neighbor on the back.

Then the light hits Morrison. He is standing in the aisle, his back straight. He is not looking out the window at the helicopters. He is looking directly at me. And he is smiling. It’s not the reassuring smile he’s been using on the other passengers. It’s a small, precise, triumphant smile. The smile of a man whose project has reached its successful conclusion. He slowly, deliberately, reaches into his coat and pulls out his thermos. He twists the cap, the sound of the seal breaking unnaturally loud under the roar of the rotor blades. He’s closing up shop. The job is done. The blizzard wasn't the trap. It was just the cage. This is not a rescue. This is the collection.

The side door of the train car screeches, a horrific sound of metal on frozen metal, as it’s forced open from the outside.