Now Dale’s bulk was pushing her back from the desk, and they were toppling back through the doorway to the office together, and she didn't have to look at that forbidding tableau anymore. She worried about being crushed under him, because he had a good hundred pounds on her, but he hit the doorframe on the way down and didn’t follow her all the way to the floor. A rush of air that took the form of a grunt lurched out of him, and he slumped down next to her legs. She reached for him instinctively -– and then the brittle, ripping sound came.
Her eyes flew up to the spot she had just vacated behind the desk, and saw a huge, flat form like a black bird come swooping down. It was the overhead television screen, swinging like a scythe from the wires that the tremor had pulled out of the wall along with it. Glenda marveled at the way it came down so neatly, perfectly arcing through the spot where her face had recently been.
After two long swings back and forth, the wires gave out and the screen crashed down onto the desk itself, a flat thump and a spidery ice-crack sound coming out of it before it slid off onto the floor. It landed squarely on the carpet pad that Glenda had put down to keep her feet from getting too sore during long shifts. All this had happened before she could place her hand on Dale. For a moment, she wasn’t even sure where she was touching him, but then he groaned and turned a little, and she realized she had instinctively found his elbow.
The vibration she had seen in the grandfather clock’s second hand was everywhere now, as if the building itself had become a tuning fork. There were also vast cracking and splintering sounds coming from out in the lobby, as if the whole place were being slowly ground between gargantuan teeth. But she felt strangely safe with her hand on Dale’s arm. She didn’t hear any sounds of destruction coming from the small warren of offices behind her, so she knew he had gotten her away from the immediate threat, and now she was going to be okay.
All of a sudden, she realized how quickly he must have moved. She had been blinded by the darkness for only two or three seconds; he would have had to run down to the end of the counter, dash through the gap between it at the wall, and make the return trip in order to tackle her like he had. She wouldn't have guessed that he could move that fast, especially in the dark, but apparently something had motivated him to. She distantly wondered if it was the fact that it was she who was in danger. Would he have moved that quickly for the first shift desk manager?
Dale's breathing was heavy and harsh, but she didn’t feel like she could ask him if he was all right yet. The rumbling made the idea of speaking aloud silly; it felt like any lesser vibrations in the air would just be swallowed up. This whole thing felt enough like a dream to make her not want to risk opening her mouth and having nothing come out -– a staple of her nightmares since she had been a girl.
Dale put his hand over hers, and it felt like it completely dwarfed her fingers. She couldn’t help but break into a smile, there in the dark.
"Are you okay?" he asked, and the quality of his voice suddenly made her concerned for his state than her own.
"I think so," she said, found less breath in her lungs that she thought there should be. "You?"
"Yeah," he said, shifting around so he could sit next to her. She almost giggled at the ludicrousness of it; she had never considered the idea that the spot directly behind her work station could be sat in, much less with Dale right there on the floor next to her. "What the hell, man?" he mused, probably to himself more than her.
She answered anyway. "Some kind of earthquake?" She'd never been in one before, but if she had to imagine what one was like, it would have been almost exactly like what they had just gone through.
"Maybe," he mused, still sounding pained. "I should go check it out." He started to stand up, but she didn't want him to go just yet. She tightened her grip on his hand.
"Hold on," she said for real reason.
"You hear something?" he asked.
"No," she said after a slight pause. She hoped that maybe he would take her cue, that what she really wanted was for him to stay here with her a little longer, just so she could keep smelling his cologne and feeling his body heat, so that she wouldn't have to be the one in charge of this mess for a few seconds more.
He did give her about ten more seconds before he said, "I've got to get up, Glenda. If this was bad through the whole lodge, I've got to make sure everyone's okay."
She sighed a little, knowing that she had to give him up for the greater good, at least for now. "Yeah," she said, releasing his hand from hers. "Go make sure everyone's safe."
He got up, following his calling. Secure the area. Save those who need saving. Deal with all the Stuff You Have to Deal With. She felt guilty that she couldn't take as much pride and drive from those thoughts as he did.
He picked up his flashlight from where it had rolled up against the wall beside them, got to his feet, and looked around. Glenda didn't look at the way the beam played around the lobby, checking for damage or danger, but the way its light threw his strong silhouette into relief. She sat there on the floor behind the desk and watched him, observing as he did his job.
-2.4-
Later on, he would marvel at the fact that they had actually finished having sex, even when it seemed like the world was literally crashing down around them. As a blast of artic air accompanied by blowing snow and pieces of ice rained down on them, their bodies kept moving. She had been close again when it happened; he knew her body well enough to know the signs, and they had all been flashing at him in tandem, just moments to go. He was right there with her, too, and despite the noise and pressure drop it was pure animal instinct to keep going. In that moment, the seeming implosion of their room was just more sensory input.
Their bodies rocked, began the process of slowing down, and then Kelly breathlessly whispered, “Noj, what the fuck just happened?”
Somehow his head found its way out of the tangle of terrycloth and flesh that they were mutually buried in, and he felt fully just how cold the room had suddenly become. It had nothing to do with how warm he had been inside the bathrobe-cocoon with Kelly; it was as cold as if they had suddenly found themselves outside. And as he looked around the room, that estimation wasn’t too far off. The patio doors no longer existed, and appeared to have been replaced a long, white landslide that extended halfway across the room and fanned out near the bottom, until it covered nearly the whole floor in inches of whiteness. A haze of pulverized snow hung in the air, instantly melting on his overheated face as it began to settle. The place where the doors had been were full of this heavy whiteness; the only reason he could still see was because one corner of the window on the other wall was only partially blanked out by the same white mass.
“I don’t -–“ he began, but then he found that he knew exactly what had happened. There was only one way that much snow could become piled in their room that quickly. And considering that their room was on the second floor, it was a big one.
Kelly’s head came up out of the pile of cloth and bedclothes, craned around like his. “Wow,” she breathed. “Are we good, or what?”
He laughed a little in spite of the disorienting situation, and rolled off Kelly. He couldn't help but note that she didn't close up her bathrobe before sitting up and surveying the damage. Manoj started to dismount on the side of the bed furthest from the patio doors, but she put out an arm to stop him. "Watch out, baby," she said. "All that broken glass is down there somewhere."
"Good point," he murmured, and looked over the edge of the bed. His slippers were sitting exactly where they had been, perpendicular to the bed and parallel to each other, as if they hadn't noticed anything was amiss. He swung his feet into them and then stood. He realized that the jumble of long shapes against the far wall was the combined mass of the door frames, twisted beyond recognition. They must have caught against the footboard and flipped over on their way across the room, he mused. So it was a good thing that he had been focused on pushing Kelly through the headboard at the time, or he might have found himself missing both his feet.
He squinted down at the snow piled around him, trying to pick out any jagged shapes that might be sticking out of it, but didn't see any. "I think it's okay. It was probably safety glass."
"It's still sharp, though," she said, putting out her arm to him again. "Watch out."
He tenderly stepped around the foot of the bed, found himself facing down the huge, angled slope of snow that had invaded their space. He frowned at it, surprised that it seemed so neatly shaped, as if it had been extruded through the space the previously-existing doors had created. He mused that, if this had been a movie, it would have been the fornicating couple that bought it at the moment of disaster. But here they were, seemingly unscathed. He turned back to Kelly, and despite the cold he was disappointed to see that she had fully re-encased her body in terrycloth.
"Our luggage is under there, isn't it?" she asked. And she was right. Every other piece of clothing they owned was separated from them by a chest-deep pile of snow that might very well have jagged chunks of sliding-door glass churned through it. So they were stuck with just their bathrobes for now. Well, at least they weren't going to need to divide up the sheets in order to cover themselves. If this had happened before the sundaes, that's what they would be doing.
"It's some kind of snowslide, isn't it?" she asked. "An avalanche?"
"Yeah, I guess," he said. He had known the word, of course, but for some reason his mind couldn't put together his idea of such a phenomenon with what had just happened. He couldn't stop looking at the room, his disbelieving head slowly swiveling back and forth like a security camera, trying to collect as much data as he could.
"Should we go out into the hall?" Kelly asked. "See if there's anyone else out there?"
Manoj frowned. In spite of the fact that clearly something sort of horrible had happened, some fiercely stubborn part of him acknowledged that he didn't want to let go of this first weekend alone with Kelly. Not yet. "Maybe we should just stay put. Isn't that what they say you should do in an emergency?"
Kelly was up off the bed in an instant, heading for the door. "I'm cold, though. let me just stick my head out and see." Manoj reached for her arm, but she was already out of reach. She had to tug on the door a few times -- Manoj could see even in the dim light that it was just the slightest bit askew -- but then it burst open with a loud squawk of protesting wood. He cursed himself for not being the first one to act.
When he came up behind her, she was standing halfway out in the hall, one arm still hooked around the vaguely-canted jamb. She was pointing down the hall, toward where the stairway from the lobby joined their hall. Things looked almost normal from where they stood, although he knew that was probably because all the lights were off, their minds filling in the shapes as they remembered them from before, as they wanted them to still be. Past the end of her finger, a vague, jittery light was growing brighter about halfway down, started to coalesce. As it swept around jumpily, it revealed the reality of the hallway, which became more and more full of corners and angles that shouldn't have been there.
The beam finally gathered itself together into a tight beam, and the shape of a man propelled itself up into the hallway. He swung his flashlight up and down the hall. It stung the couple's eyes at it found and stayed on them.
"You folks all right down there?" he said, loudly enough to be heard clearly in the strange stillness.
Kelly was quick to answer, "Yes. What just happened?", only to be eclipsed by a different man's voice, farther away than the flashlight bearer's, calling "We need help down here!" Its tone didn't convey panic, but there definitely was a sense of urgency to it.
The man behind the flashlight turned away, and in silhouette Manoj could now comprehend his shape fully; he was a tall, broad man, exactly the kind that his mind's eye expected to see when Kelly was finally stolen away from him. The guy was in some kind of official uniform as well, although he couldn't make out the kind. His insecurity shields went up immediately.
Kelly was away and trotting down the hall toward the human beacon before Manoj could even think to stop her. Her bathrobe was swinging loosely around her body, slippered feet -- when had she managed to put those on? -- barely slowed by the shifted terrain under the hall rug. As she receded from Manoj, the flashlight man turned toward the calling voice, taking off at almost the same speed the other way down the hall. Manoj sighed, and followed them.
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