Whitelodge 3.5 & 3.6

-3.5-

The pain was incredible. Harmon felt like everything was broken. He believed his head was higher than his legs, which was a good thing, survival-wise, but other than that he couldn't tell much. The cold had already crept into his legs far enough that he only had the vaguest sense of whether they were still attached to him.

His arms seemed to be spread out away from his body, which was bad in terms of keeping warm. He felt as if he had been suspended in the snow surrounding him, hung like a forgotten marionette somewhere between hard ground and breathable air. How far he was from either he couldn't tell.

Despite the general ache and the audible grating of joints, he began trying to move. Except for his left leg. That one, he knew, was toast. Even thinking about trying to move it hurt. Not as badly as the ankle itself had when it snapped, but then again he had no idea how long he had been lying in the snow, stunned and losing body heat, before he had come fully back into consciousness. He tried moving his right leg experimentally, without much success. His left arm could hardly move. But the right...

It took a good thirty seconds of experimental motion before he discovered the very real possibility that his right hand might be above the snow. It could move about freely, and sometimes a flex of its muscles would cause a slight trickle of snow to slide up his sleeve. He thought that meant he was scooping up snow that was at least loose enough to be scooped, which wouldn't have happened if he were deeply buried.

And then there was the matter of breathing, and the fact that it was actually happening. Ten feet down, you're not going to find any more breathable oxygen after a few seconds. But he seemed to be doing okay. There was no noticeable pressure when he tried to expand his lungs. That was a good sign of shallow burial, too. After putting the inevitable off for a little longer, he knew he had to try turning his head. Of course, this was the riskiest proposition of all. He might make matters much worse, snapping an already strained spine, or causing a small cascade that could fill his nose and mouth. But the alternative to action was to continue just as he was now, slowly losing more heat every second.

Harmon slowly rotated his neck, and a blazing red light pounded against one closed eyelid. He let out something between a horrified shriek and a triumphant laugh, because in his precarious situation, light meant life. He tried every few seconds to fully open that eye, and the prospect became less and less preposterous each time. Eventually, he was able to blink enough melting particles out of his lashes to form a more coherent picture of where he was.

He was lying on the floor of a miniature cathedral, where all the overhead arches and buttresses were formed by branches: thick, knobby, evergreen branches. They stretched in every direction he could manage to rotate his vision, the packed bristles acting like webbing to hold back the crushing force of snow that he could see at the fringes. And now that he was partially oriented, he could see that the trunk was nearby, lying roughly parallel alongside him.

The irony of his being saved by a tree falling on top of him was not lost, even less so due to the way he had obtained his titanium spine pins (which, by the way, had mostly stopped making their vibratory presence known, although whether that was because the rest of his body was in more excruciating pain was yet to be seen). However, he now had a slightly more serious problem. He was now pinned with -- at the very least -- a broken ankle, and not only had a thick blanket of snow, but also half the width of a full-grown pine between him and the world above. Good in the short term, not good in the long.

Just as Harmon began to wonder how talented Dale was at wielding a shovel, he remembered his last interchange with the burly security guard. Dale had thrust a walkie-talkie at Harmon, which he had dutifully tucked into the front inside pocket of the coat he was still wearing. He could feel it lying there now, and from the lack of stinging plastic splinters in his ribs, he judged it was likely still intact. Getting to it would be a bit of a problem given his prone position, but he'd do his best.

Unfortunately, every movement sent pain shooting through all his limbs. His torso seemed to be the most intact thing about him, and he vaguely wondered if it were due to its metallic reinforcements. He might have them to thank, if he made it through this ordeal. As he pulled his hand out from its glove and started snaking it under himself to get the walkie, he looked up at the dim beauty of the tree surrounding him.

He could see the way the overarching branches were bent under the weight of the snow lying on top of them, and how they managed to interlock tightly enough to not let the snow come through in more than powdery trickles. It was a custom-made air pocket that wasn't really as large as he had estimated originally. His breath would run out in an hour, maybe a little less. He had to get word back to the lodge that he was out here... but how to tell them where to look? For all he knew, the avalanche had toppled acres of trees; although enough moonlight was filtering through for him to see -- barely -- he would just have to hope that his tree was close enough to the surface to be seen.

His hand managed to produce the walkie, which was a step in the right direction. The bad news was that it wasn't entirely undamaged; the plastic housing around the microphone hole was punched in, and he had no way of knowing whether it would work. He tried it a few times anyway, speaking in as calm a voice as he could that he needed help. But something about the sound of his own voice, sounding so desperate and cracked and closed in by surrounding branches and snow, made him feel closer to panic than anything that had happened up until that point. He decided it would be better to shut up.

Instead, he would use clicks, tapping the activation button in Morse code. He already knew that a good old S.O.S. wasn't going to cut it, so he was going to have to dig deep to remember more letters and give more usable information. He thought about it for a while (tapping out "SOS" to get his rhythm set before while he worked it out), and eventually settled on "buried w of serv rd". He realized that Dale or Glenda were the only people who might understand the message, since they were the only people who knew he had left the lodge. But they'd be the most likely to hear it, anyway.

He tapped and tapped and tapped, giving a few seconds' pause between each repetition of the message. For a long time, it was only him and the hushed silence, and the tensing of his hand as he clicked, over and over again. After a while, he stopped expecting anyone to respond. He tried to imagine that he was a rabbit, safe in his underground warren, that this was the place he actually wanted to be. He didn't fully believe it, even after what seemed like hours of repetitive tapping, but it helped.

Just as he was starting to consider stopping his message, that it was pointless and he should save even the small amount of energy his task sapped from him, the walkie started speaking back.

-3.6-

Carlos wished he could get to the sinks. Then he would have been able to wet some towels and clean up some of the mess that Benny had been turned into, but the basins were the first things ripped apart by the snow's violent invasion of the kitchen. He thought about using the snow itself -- now that his co-worker had been pulled entirely free of the reddening pile, the fringes of it were starting to melt against the room-temperature floor -- but decided against it. It was full of bits of glass, wood, shattered tile, and who knew what else.

The first thing Carlos had done when the lights went out was to leave Benny momentarily, run to the pair of large refrigerators, and throw open both doors. The surreal scene was currently side-lit, thanks to the self-contained batteries that the fridges both held in case of such a power outage, although Carlos had never envisioned one happening like this. Now he looked down at all he could stand to witness of Benny.

The older man's head, still covered by the apron which had flipped up over it in the deluge, was clearly bleeding profusely. The fabric was entirely soaked through with the densely red stuff, and neat scarlet lines were radiating away from his head along the grout patterns in the floor, spreading like an obscene geometric nimbus. Carlos had to do something to stop that. That was priority one. One of his strong suits as a sous chef was his ability to quantify tasks and arrange them like blocks in his head, maximizing time and minimizing effort. Right now, he thought, there were three things he needed for his friend: pressure on the wound, cold to slow the bleeding, and clean materials for sterilization.

Carlos closed his eyes and took one slow breath. He pressed his hand to the spot on the apron that seemed to cover the source of the bleeding (and telling himself that the sickening *give* he felt in Benny's skull underneath was just his imagination) while he scanned his surroundings. That ticked "pressure" off his list, but to obtain the other two he was going to have to give it up, at least momentarily. He found that he was still talking to Benny under his breath without even thinking about it as he looked around -- "Hang in there, buddy. Gonna clean this up, get you somewhere safe..." -- and was surprised at how rational and sane his words sounded.

Cold was next on the list. They suddenly had that item in spades here in the kitchen, so Carlos gathered a big scoop of it in his free hand and gently pressed it against the same blood-sodden spot on the apron. The cold sent slow needles into his palm, but he grimaced and kept pressing. The snow didn't melt immediately, but it was clear that it wasn't going to last long. He packed on a few subsequent handfuls, watched as each gathered lump turned into a small mound of dark pink slush. It would have to do until he thought of something better.

Carlos spun around, realized that he did have a source of clean water after all. The stock pot he had been prepping was still sitting on the burner, which had not yet gone out, since it was a gas stove. Underneath his subconsciously-spoken words, he could still hear it boiling away. The only thing he had managed to throw into it so far was the mirepoix. Since he had thoroughly cleaned the onions, celery, and carrots before adding them, he figured the water was the most sterile in the kitchen. He took a moment to mentally focus on what he needed to do, as not to leave Benny unattended for any longer than he had to, and jumped to his feet.

He imagined that as the pressure of his hand came off his friend's head, the fallen man let out a little groan, which gave Carlos's feet further impetus to hurry. He dashed across the kitchen -- making sure to keep his body's weight directly over his feet, balancing on the sheer amount of blood and water on the floor that was increasing every second -- and grabbed first for the pile of fresh towels at the end of the counter. He swept up as many as he could in the crook of his arm, then reached for the oversize stock pot. Taking it by its silicone-wrapped handles, he slid it off the blue gas flame. He staggered a little under its weight and the added awkwardness of a cocked arm full of towels, but managed to stay upright. He didn't think until afterward that it good the water didn't splash and douse the flame, because with the power out he wouldn't be able to spark it into life again, and stumbled toward the snow bank.

He picked a level spot and lowered the pot into it, trying to keep it from spilling. He twisted the handles back and forth like a steering wheel, letting the pot's own heat and weight sink it down into the snow bank. Hopefully, that would cool it significantly faster than just setting it on the floor. Carlos paused just a second, to take a deep breath of the aromatics coming from the pot, an oasis of familiarity in this bizarre situation he suddenly found himself in, and took the towels out from under his arm. One by one, he started to dunk them in the water, making sure that there was enough of the corners hanging over the edge to not let them get pulled into the pot entirely as they soaked up the still-boiling water. Carlos immersed about half of the towels this way, then turned back to Benny holding the rest.

This was going to be the hard part. He was going to have to pull away the apron and see what was underneath. The snow he had packed onto his friend's head was all but melted away, and Carlos grimaced, realizing that as it melted and soaked into the apron covering his face, he may have been slowly drowning his friend. This, more than anything else, gave him the strength to pull away the sodden, clinging fabric.

At first all he saw underneath was blood, but after his mind began to quell its own panic, he saw that there really was still a face underneath. Benny's countenance was still, almost placid, the most disconcerting part being that his eyes were half-open and totally glazed over red, filled with blood. The melting snow had run up and back into Benny's hair, pulling his too-long graying bangs away from his forehead, and it was there that the actual wound began. Carlos had no idea how far up over his scalp it went, but it was pretty far, and it was still pulsing a little as blood continued to flow.

Carlos steeled himself again, reminding himself of two things he knew: that head wounds always bleed a lot, looking worse than they really are; and that blood mixed with a lot of water looks like a lot of blood. It seemed there was no other fluid in sight here, but Carlos had to reassure himself with these facts so he wouldn't worry that Benny was already bleeding out.

Carlos set the remaining stack of towels down on the floor, sacrificing the bottom one to soak up dirty water and blood so the others could stay dry. Taking one of these upper towels, he wrapped up a couple handfuls of clean-ish snow in it, then pressed the impromptu icepack onto the bleeding stripe atop Benny's head. He put as much weight on it as he dared, and then reached back to the stock pot, which was now only simmering a bit thanks to the chill it had been placed in. He grabbed the corner of one of the towels hanging over the rim and pulled it out of the water, watching it steam as he lifted it into the air.

Carlos adjusted his grip on it, then furiously swung it around and around over his head, as if he were preparing to throw it like a lasso. Beads of boiling water flew across the kitchen in a circle, both wringing out and cooling the towel at the same time. When he thought it was safe, Carlos brought it down and pressed it against his own face. It was still hot, but a soothing kind of heat, like the warm towel he had been offered on the flight out to take this job.

He looked down, and realized already that the towel on Benny's head would already need changing. That was fine; he had a small stack at the ready. He was going to keep one hand on the cold towel on the wound, and use the warm towels to first clean Benny's face, then clean the wound itself once the bleeding had slowed.

His list of tasks continued to unspool before him. He knew that, at some point, obvious courses of action would run out. He was too terrified to think beyond that point, but for now he was focused, his mind clear.

Whitelodge 3.4

Manoj tried to focus on the white of Kelly's bathrobe as he plodded down the hall after her. Unlike her, he hadn't managed to keep his slippers on through their second bedroom encounter, and now was falling behind rapidly as she made her way down the hall. It didn't occur to him that his feet might need some kind of protection until he started to feel odd risings and fallings of the thin carpet under his feet. The perturbations grew worse the farther he moved down the hall, and eventually he stopped, watching Kelly turn from a patch of lighter darkness to a vague silhouette against the bobbing light far ahead, then to nothing.

He picked his way along tentatively after that, wondering if he should turn back to find his own slippers. He couldn't quite remember where they had fallen off, but if they hadn't been on Kelly's side of the bed, they were surely buried under feet of snow now. He pressed on.

Manoj had never enjoyed being in enclosed spaces, which was ironic for a game programmer. He had worked in the spatial equivalents of janitor's closets before, but at the time he hadn't minded. When he was in flow, the code seeming to drip like oil from his fingertips without his consciously thinking about it, the closeness of the walls didn't seem to matter. At those moments, he was inside the computer, sharing its thoughts and weaving them into shape.

Here, however, there was nothing to occupy his mind but awareness of the space around him. He had walked down this hallway several times before, but now he had a hard time remembering how wide it was. That uncertainty began to pick at his brain, and he found himself thinking he was going to bump into first one wall on his left, then the other on his right, even though he knew at least one of those impressions had to be wrong.

Finally, light began to grow ahead of him, and a sense of his surroundings started to come back. There was a thumping far ahead, but he couldn't figure out what it was. Someone trying call for help, pounding on the walls to alert someone else they were trapped?

His heart leaped in his chest when the wall to his left suddenly fell away, and he had a sudden sense of vertigo. He had been instantly transported high in the air, a deep, open space opening up right next to him. Before he could lose his balance, he realized that what he was familiar. He was at the top of the lodge's main staircase, looking down over a shadow-representation of the room he and Kelly had first entered on their arrival. He grabbed the bannister at the top of the stairs, and tried to relax.

Down below, there was something clicking, a messy, staticky sound. It took his mind a moment to realize that it was in a measured rhythm, a gridwork of information. His mind locked onto its pulse, and he sighed when he felt that sense of familiarity. Something in this tilted, dark madness had suddenly become a known quantity.

He recognized the code before he had descended three steps toward level ground. It was coming from somewhere near the front desk, which looked worse than most other places he had seen in the lodge so far. A mess of wires hung down from above it, and broken plastic was scattered everywhere. In the utter silence (the pounding from above had stopped, after it had briefly devolved into a short series of crunching sounds), he began to make out some of the letters he was hearing, for that was what they were. R. I. E. D., it spelled out in Morse code. A pause, then a lone W preceded another pause. O. F. Pause. S. E. R. V.

A form glided out from a dark doorway beyond the desk, almost making Manoj jump out of his skin. It was a woman, slowly walking right up to the remains of the desk, and he found he recognized her. She was the woman who had checked them in when they arrived that afternoon. Or at least, it was an anti-world version of her; she was ghostly in the diffused light. They were now facing each other in circumstances that couldn't have been more different than their previous encounter, even though it was occurring in the same place.

She took no similar notice of him, however. She was looking at the desk itself, as if that were the clicking sound's origin. And the closer he got, he realized that it was. But he couldn't make sense of that; the lodge's power had clearly gone out, and the desk itself looked pretty well broken. What could be making that sound?

The woman suddenly looked up at Manoj and rocked back a little, noticing him for the first time. He stopped his descent, not wanting to scare her further. For a long moment they regarded each other, the clicks punctuating the air, getting accustomed the other's presence.

"Service road," Manoj finally said, barely above a whisper.

"What?" the woman asked. He couldn't read her expression in the dim light.

"It's spelling out 'service road'."

"You can tell what he's saying?"

"Sure. It's Morse code. My friends and I used to send secret messages across the classroom to each other that way, using the Caps Lock lights on our keyboards."

"What?"

"Not important," Manoj said. "Who is that?"

"Harmon," Glenda replied, ripping a walkie-talkie -- clearly the source of the sound -- off its Velcro perch behind the lip of the counter. She stretched out her arm toward Manoj, who was still standing on the bottommost stair. "Can you tell me what else he's saying?"

Manoj moved forward cautiously. He had missed a few letters while they had been talking. "Um... " He listened again, realized he was coming around to the beginning of text loop he had already heard. "Buried!" he barked, excited at this fact, and then quieted down when he realized the content was conveying something dire. "West of the service road, is what he's saying. He says he's been buried." His gaze drifted to the front windows of the lobby, realizing that the darkness keeping most of the light out was the same powdery thickness that had invaded his hotel room.

The desk attendant's free hand rose to her mouth instinctively, not quite blocking the gasp from escaping her mouth. "Oh, God," she moaned from behind it once it was in place. "We've got to get him out!" Then her eyes turned toward the front of the building as well, and he imagined he could see her face paling as she realized the magnitude of what she was saying.

Manoj didn't feel he had anything to add to her revelation, so he kept listening to the clicking code, to see if the message changed or was augmented in any way. It wasn't, just the same repeating phrase, benign until you thought about it... "Buried w of serv road."

"Is he an employee?" was all he could think of to ask.

The desk attendant's wide, horrified eyes swiveled back to him. "No," she said as if her mouth were numb from cold already, "sort of a permanent resident. I've got to get Dale." Still holding the walkie-talkie out in front of her, she began to walk around the end of the desk. Manoj had since crossed about half the distance from the bottom of the stairs to the desk, and as she passed, the attendant pressed the rattling object into his hand. "Excuse me," she said.

Without actually looking at him, she passed by and headed up the first few steps of the creaky wooden staircase. The sound unnerved Manoj; he remembered how solid it had felt when he walked up it earlier in the day, as if it had been carved whole, out of the trunk of one titanic tree. Now he wasn't entirely sure if it would collapse under her.

"Dale?" the woman was calling up the stairs. The sound seemed sacrilegiously loud in the hushed space, and didn't echo as much as it seemed like it should have. She waited only a few seconds before calling again: "Dale!!"

For just a moment, Manoj felt like he should turn down the walkie's volume so she didn't miss whatever response might come, but then realized that there was likely a dying human being trying to communicate on the other end and stayed his hand. A man's voice came floating down the hall, far away but deep and strong. "Kind of got a situation here, Glenda! Hang on."

"Harmon's calling in!" she belted, as if volume could convey importance in this situation. "He's in trouble!"

Another few seconds, and the voice repeated, considerably more strained, "Hang on a second, honey..."

Glenda, whose name Manoj now knew, actually stepped backward as if she had been slapped by this response, her heel almost faltering as she forgot she was on the stairs. When she turned around toward Manoj and started back down the stairs, she had the strangest look on her face, a combination of a smile and utter puzzlement. It was one that Manoj had seen before. It was the look of a gamer who has solved a tricky puzzle, but wasn't entirely sure how they had done it.

She came back down the stairs slowly, mildly stunned, and then started heading back to the check-in desk. Then she changed direction and started moving toward the front doors, picking up speed as she went. Manoj had no idea what she had in mind, but found his feet following her. She pushed on the inner pair of front doors, and almost walked right into them when they didn't give with the same ease that she was used to. She pushed harder, even leaned her shoulder against the heavy-polished grain, but they wouldn't give. Manoj was relieved; he hadn't had to time to think about what he would have done if she had gotten through, and then had tried to break through the outer doors, which were currently managing to hold back the metric tons of snow piled against them.

He reached her as Glenda began pounding on the door, growls of frustration coming from deep within her throat. He was just about to step forward, to warn her about the tension the glass must be under if the door were twisted enough to be unopenable, but then she hit the frame with just a little more force than it could handle, and the huge panel in the center of it shattered. Glenda's frustrated growls turned to a yelp as bits of shattered glass fell down around her feet. Manoj jumped back at least three feet, thinking of the bare state of his feet.

Once she had let out that one surprised bark, Glenda turned from the door and stumbled toward the long, plush couch against the wall opposite the lobby desk. She threw herself down on it, hammered one fist against the cushion next to her head, then buried her face and lay still.

Manoj stood there, not knowing what to do, and looked up the stairs to the second floor, willing someone to come help. There were at least two people up there who were better equipped than he to deal with the situation: Kelly and that Dale person, whoever he was.

The only thing he felt adequately able to deal with was the Morse code still snapping away in his hand. The walkie hadn't stopped sending its message, but Manoj knew something about it that no one else listening would. It was too subtle to be noticed yet, but his own expertise made it plain to his ear.

The clicks were starting to slow down.

Whitelodge 3.3

"There are people up there," Glenda whispered. She had heard a few screams after the lingering vibrations of the building had died away, and after those she thought she could hear the same voices, faint but sounding as if they were speaking to each other over a long distance. She started to get up, but Dale's hand stopped her.

"Let me first," he muttered, out of breath. She felt him shifting around to get his legs under himself, and then he was standing over her, blocking out even more light. He stood still, and she imagined she could see him inclining his head to the side, listening for the voices she claimed to have heard, or any other telltale signs from the building. After a few seconds, he seemed satisfied and turned partially back to her, extended a hand. "Come on up," he said, not an order but a suggestion.

Glenda took his hand and allowed herself to be lifted to her feet, which he seemed to be able to do without expending any extra effort. She looked around at the lobby, noting how everything had shifted subtly to the left, the heavy chairs rucking up the rugs into uneasy waves, the lines of the walls not quite matching up the way they should. It made her feel a slight swell of vertigo.

"Stay here," Dale was saying as he moved away from her, stepping around the edge of the counter and out into the new territory that the lobby had worked itself into. She was relieved that he didn't see the way her hand was still reaching for his. He had unclipped his flashlight from his belt and held it up alongside his face, paralleling his eyes as he looked around.

Now that he was separated from her, she realized how much his breathing had covered the ambient sounds of the hotel. The voices from upstairs were much clearer now; a male voice asked questions, a much farther away female voice answered. Were they a couple, trying to find their way back to each other? At least their conversation seemed to have some kind of positive effect... she had stopped screaming and they were now having an almost rational conversation. It was just one more layer of strangeness to lay on top of this world that she thought she had known, up until mere moments ago.

Watching as Dale picked his way across the bunched rugs and warped floorboards on his way to the stairs, Glenda found herself yearning to occupy her usual spot behind the desk. Somehow, her mind had half-convinced her that if she were to stand in that familiar spot, all the curved and crooked lines would suddenly snap back into true, as if it were only her current perspective that was off. But she found her way barred by the fallen TV screen, bits of plastic crunching under her sneakers before she even got within a few steps.

Dale was panning his flashlight around as he approached the bottom of the stairs, and Glenda could tell by the way it was zipping from spot to spot that he was jumpy, instinctively checking out every odd corner or unexpected reflection of his light. She wanted to go with him, to steady his arm with her own, to explore this new country together. But for now she stayed where she was.

As he began to ascend, and as it became clearer that the ceiling wasn't going to finish its collapse any time soon, Glenda turned her eyes toward the wide, high windows at the front of the building. There was still a lot of light coming in; it just was a paltry amount compared to how much there usually was. On bright days, with the sun gleaming off the snow, you could almost feel like you really were outside. There were certain times of year when she would actually put sunblock and lightly-tinted sunglasses on before reporting to work, knowing that she would be receiving so much second-hand glare.

Tonight, there was only a dim outline of the terrain downhill from the lodge. Around the edges of the panoramic view, it looked like the ground had risen a noticeable amount. She knew that this was surely the new snow that had cascaded down like a wave. Had part of that white tide hit the lodge itself? Is that what had happened, the reason why everything seemed skewed to the side? And if so, how much longer could the lodge hold up against the continuous pressure of all that whiteness?

As if in answer, a block of snow the size of a charter bus suddenly came down off the roof, falling in front of the doors and blocking them completely. Glenda managed to demote her startled scream to a grunt before it escaped her throat.

Dale, halfway up the stairs, had turned to her in an instant and was shining the flashlight in her face. She squinted as she turned away from the front of the building. "Sorry," she said, her shoulders shuddering.

From behind the glare, she could feel Dale assessing her, making sure she was okay. Finally he said, "I'm going to check the second floor. See if anyone needs help. Stay there, okay?"

Glenda nodded, and the light swung away. She wished he would have waited a second before continuing, so her eyes could have adjusted back to the gloom and she could have seen his face before he finished his ascent, but he didn't. He went up and over the top step before she could make out his shape in the dark.

Then she was alone. She looked behind her, at the doorway they had both dived into as it had happened. She realized that, even though the lights had gone out, which had probably meant the phone lines as well, there was still a way for her to contact the outside world. Without taking time to consider whether it was a good idea, she turned from her post and headed into the back offices.

The hallway was almost entirely dark, and within a few steps she was working off of memory, overlaid with a vague sense of place, the source of which she couldn't determine. Was she seeing faint outlines of things, or was she actually echolocating with her own terrified breathing? Whatever the reason, she was able to avoid a decorative wooden pilaster that had come loose from the wall and now cut a diagonal across the space she had to walk through. She ducked under it and made her way to the very end of the hall. She stepped to the left, through a door she had never entered without being summoned from the other side.

She couldn't quite make out the black stenciled letters on the door's pane, but she knew perfectly well what they said -- Jim Gough, Executive Director -- and imagined she could feel the sign watching her as she inched past it. Inside the office, things weren't in terrible disarray; Jim ran an unusually tidy office, every scrap of paper in a binder or a file drawer, every picture framed and double-tacked to the wall, so that even the shaking they had endured couldn't dislodge them. In fact, it looked like the only items in the room that had moved were the ones on his desk: a pair of small free-standing picture frames, now tipped on their faces, a pencil holder, the antiquated Rolodex that he insisted on continuing to use.

While the Deertail prided itself on not having any public communication more advanced than the select house phones that could still access the landlines that ran to the town below, there was one wireless point of contact, and she was now in the same room as it. Despite the order, there was still a sense of wrongness about the room, and she couldn't tell if it was because of the dim light filtering through the snow-covered windows (which she could tell were littered with cracks, although they seemed to be holding together), or the fact that she was alone in a place she'd never been alone in before. In any event, she knew what she had to do next.

She moved over to the credenza that had been backed up under the windows on the far side of the office, and knelt down cautiously on the floor next to it. She felt the cold air spilling down from the windows and shivered for the first time that night. She reached for the little knobs that would open the accordion doors that lined the front of the credenza, and pulled.

They didn't open. She tugged, harder, but they still didn't budge. She could tell from the way the doors wobbled that whatever mechanism was keeping them shut wasn't particularly robust, but it was doing its job nonetheless. She sat back on her haunches, wondering if she should wait for Dale to come back so they could break it open together. She hovered there for a moment, worrying, staring at the knobs that were so tiny but stood in her way of reporting this emergency.

She stood up, went over to Jim's desk, and looked for the most valuable thing she could find. She decided on the crystal Customer Service Award they had won from the Greater Rockies Tourism Board three years previously, just before she had come to work here. It had barely moved from its usual spot on Jim's desk, where its heft had sat in full view of anyone sitting before him. She yanked the award up from its spot and walked back to the credenza, feeling it swinging at the end of her arm.

She crouched back down and raised the award as high as she could, brought it down toward the smug little knobs that were holding the doors shut. She missed them, but when the award hit the of the door instead, she heard what she hoped was a significant crack from inside. The second blow came down straight, breaking off one of the little ceramic knob and a sizeable chunk of the door too. Its splintered edges crackled, and the doors swung partly open.

Glenda tossed aside the award now that it had done its job, and the adrenaline burning through her arm caused it to fly farther than she expected, cracking against something on the wall. The sound was strange, so she threw a look that way, and noted that she had hit the corner of a picture frame she'd never noticed when she was in the office before. Of course she hadn't; on the rare occasions she had been in the office, she'd been looking at her boss, not behind herself.

In the dim light that filtered through the disaster outside, she could see that the picture was clearly too large to be just a generic piece of art on an office wall. It was a painting of a woman that Glenda immediately thought of as ancient Roman -- she was wearing what appeared to be a toga and had a crown of tiny white flowers woven through her hair. She was walking forward, toward the window of the frame with a mysterious smile on her face. Her robes were blowing as if there were a wind, and she seemed to be walking through an ivy-covered stone doorway. There was a familiar squiggle down in the corner of the canvas, and it wasn't until much later that she would realize that it also graced the opposing corner of her paycheck every other week. She frowned at it, then turned back to the task at hand.

Taking care not to spear her hand on the fractured wooden edge, she peeled away the folding doors on the credenza's front. She could just barely see the block of mechanism sitting on the tallest shelf, antiquated but built like a tiny tank. She was counting on that resilience now. She reached for the broadcast microphone on its satisfyingly solid stand, and slid the thumb of her other hand across the front of the thing for the power button. What she found was an honest-to-goodness switch, a miniature metal rod with a tiny ball on the end. She gave it an upward shove, and it flipped to the ON position with a satisfying click.

Nothing happened. No lights flicked on, no needles swung up into green arcs, no satisfying hum found her in the overwhelming stillness. She flipped the power switch a few more times, more for the feeling that she was physically doing something more than of an expectation that something different would occur. She flipped it faster, faster, back and forth, until she was yelling obscenities at it each time it changed between the only two states it could occupy.

Finally she threw the microphone at the thing and slumped back against the side of Jim's desk. There were so many things that could have gone wrong between that switch and the speaker that someone at the ranger station could listen to, but for the moment she was choosing to blame Jim for letting the backup battery go dead. She thumped the back of her head against the side of the desk, the shocking sound of the wood being struck temporarily allaying the pain the action caused her.

She wanted her kids. They were sleeping in the world out there somewhere, with no idea that their mother was trapped high up in a snow cave that used to be the place she worked. She wanted Dale to get to know them. She wanted him to come back from taking care of others, put her arms around her, and reassuringly kiss her. Deeply, for a long time...

She shook her head, stopped thumping it against the desk again. This wasn't the time. She stood up, wiped her hot, frustrated eyes with the heels of her hands, flipped off the smiling woman in the painting, and went back to the front desk.

The trip was easier this time, since she had gone through the short hallway once before. There was a bumping sound going on somewhere else the building. It was Dale helping others, certainly. It was what he did. She gingerly stepped around the shattered hulk of the flatscreen that had almost decapitated her, and tried to stand as close to her usual spot behind the desk as she could.

She looked over at the front doors, sighing. There was easily ten feet of snow blocking them, and they swung outward anyway, so it would take the strength of a plow to get them to budge at all. She let herself stand there a little longer, attempting to will everything back to the way it was. Gradually, she became aware of a tapping sound, one that wasn't the faraway sound of Dale breaking down doors, but something nearby, soft.

She looked down at the row of walkie-talkies velcroed to the underside of the desk's overhang. They weren't any good for contacting the outside world; it was a strictly closed-circuit arrangement, and during the work day most employees would have them as they moved around the premises. Now they were all hung up here, save for the one that Dale had on him... and the one the security guard had handed to Harmon when he left.

One of the walkies on the bank before her was clicking, slowly, methodically. At first, she thought it was a random representation of discharges, a sputtering of static. Of course, she had been trained to listen for the tell-tale SOS code: Three dots, three dashes, three dots. Pause. Three dots, three dashes, three dots. This wasn't what she was hearing, though. There didn't seem to be a pattern, but it seemed rhythmic anyway.

Just as she was reaching for the walkie, a flicker of movement caught her eye. She turned her eyes up to the main staircase, and her heart leapt into her throat as she saw a white shape gliding down it, spectral in the blue-filtered snow light.

Whitelodge 3.1 & 3.2

-3.1-

"Kerren, where are you?" Sheryl asked, blindly feeling for the edge of the bed. She had seen her go over, but her mind hadn't yet pieced together that Kerren could be pinned under the bedframe, against the wall, or both.

The screaming didn't stop. Sheryl probably hadn't even been heard. Ahead of her, felt by her hands but unseen, there were huge splinters spattered across the sheets. She feared that the convex corner of the wall, against which the bed had come to rest, had been turned into a dangerous stellation of wooden spikes between her and her wife. She inched forward as fearlessly as she dared, but couldn't shake the thought of a nasty, invisible spike drifting ever closer to her eyeball or her nostril as she moved.

In a way, she was thankful for the pained, frantic sounds Kerren was making, because it had become her only point of reference in the darkness. God, if Kerren had fallen quiet... But Sheryl couldn't tell if the screams were starting to lose intensity because Kerren was losing the strength to make them, or if she was becoming accustomed to whatever circumstance was causing them. In any event, they seemed to be coming from directly beneath her now, and she still hadn't found the edge of the bed.

"Kerren!" Sheryl called. "Calm down, honey! I'm trying to find you. Are you underneath the bed?"

Sheryl felt a feeble hand thumping against the underside of the bed, punctuated by breathy hitches in the unending wail that Kerren was producing.

"Okay!" Sheryl said, "I feel that! I'm coming closer. Just... baby, can you take a deep breath and say my name?"

The screaming tapered off, although it seemed to take more effort to stop than it would have to continue. "Sh-- Sh-- Sheryl?" Kerren's voice was finally bordering on being recognizable again.

"Right!" Sheryl said. "I'm going to figure out how to get to you... can you move out from under the bed?"

"I..." Kerren began, as if she were endangering herself even more by speaking coherently. "I don't know. I'm afraid to move. My legs hurt so bad..."

"Okay!" Sheryl said, as professionally as she could manage. "Then don't move. Let me come down to you, and we'll figure out what's going on. Maybe I can get to a flashlight or something. But you should just hold still until I can figure it out. All right?"

"All right." Kerren was clearly trying to mimic her wife's tone, as well as the words. Sheryl hoped that meant Kerren was finding something reassuring in it. Then she set about trying to figure out what to do next.

The only time she had been in a darkness so pure was when she had visited a local set of caves in elementary school. When they had reached the deepest part of the tour, the guide had demonstrated to the class what the place looked like to its original explorers by turning the installed lights off for a few seconds. Sheryl had been totally unprepared for the sensation she felt when the utter blackness descended on the class.

Despite the sounds of her classmates taking the opportunity to yell, scream, and pinch each other with abandon, Sheryl had felt the space around her open up, as if the cave walls had been suddenly yanked back away from her at an alarming speed, pulling her breath away with them to fill the sudden, yawning space. On the way back to school, Sheryl had been in a bus seat behind a pair of girls talking conspiratorially about how they had felt at that same moment. Sheryl had been surprised to find that they had felt the exact opposite of what she had; the instant the blackness engulfed them, they had both felt like the cave walls were closing in, had shrunk to fill all but the smallest of margins around their bodies, and that if they were to try moving, they would have found themselves unable to.

At the time, Sheryl hadn't known that a sample size of two girls her age wasn't big enough to extrapolate from. So her mind had been free to wonder... In that cave, had she been feeling the perfect opposite from everyone else? And if so, in what other parts of her life was the same thing happening? She felt a similar sensation years later, when she began to understand that the reason she pored over lingerie catalogs and loitered in swimsuit departments wasn't for the same reason other girls did. Again, her mind had revealed to her that it was wired differently, and it took her a long time before she realized that there were people other than her who felt the same way.

During the time she had been recalling her former encounters with blinding darkness, she had been creeping forward, her ears focused on nothing but the sound of her hands and knees sliding across the sheets, and any others that Kerren might produce from underneath the bed, which is why she physically jumped when a jarring series of loud thumps came from about ten feet in front of her. It startled Kerren, too; from somewhere below, she let loose an additional fraction of the screams she had been producing.

Sheryl was so stunned at the sudden intrusion into the silence that she couldn't respond. It wasn't until after the first flurry of thumps died away that she realized what was going on, and it was only after consulting her mental geography as to where the bed now was located in the room. Someone was pounding on the hotel room door.

She opened her mouth to respond, but the quiet turned out to merely be a pause between volleys of knocks. Her initial "Hey!" was entirely drowned out. She closed her mouth and waited until silence fell again before calling, "Who's out there?"

-3.2-

Bruce had crawled his way up the hallway, following the sound of Theda's screams. He had quickly found that by keeping on the strip of rug that somehow still ran straight down the center of the hallway, he could stay relatively safe. He could feel the rise and fall of the broken wood underneath, but there didn't seem to be enough damage to push anything sharp up through the thick material. He still clubbed any suspect protuberances he found with the heavy wooden bucket; he didn't want to put his weight down on a section only to have his own weight impale both the rug and himself on anything lurking beneath.

Through it all, Theda's desperate screams had continued. The sound had gotten closer more quickly than he had anticipated; the unrelenting surreality of the scene had somehow convinced him that she would recede as quickly as he moved toward her. But he soon found himself drawing up alongside the source, and his blood ran colder the closer he got. He could more clearly hear the restrained panic in her shrieks, and there was another voice now. He couldn’t tell exactly what it was saying, but the tones seemed to be reassuring, overly calm to balance out the frenzy of the screams. It was asking Theda to identify her as Sheryl. A quick flash of jealousy coursed through him… was she the reason Theda had abandoned him, and the now-empty world they had shared?

The only way he would ever know would be to get through to her. Theda was calming down, speaking with the woman in a more and more conversational tone. He didn’t pay much attention to the content of what was being said; he was turning his head side to side, crudely trying to triangulate her exact location. He found a particularly cruel part of his mind wishing she would start screaming again. The thought that she was being punished for leaving him, as well as the fact that it made her location easier to determine, crashed unbidden into his mind.

He pushed those thoughts aside. He had reached the door, and even though she had fallen silent, he knew it was the right one. There was a bit of shuffling behind this one, and the thought that there might be other people inhabiting the lodge didn’t even enter his mind.

Being a little closer to -- but still around a corner from -- the lobby, there was a fraction more light here. Combined with the way his eyes had adjusted to the darkness, this made things clear enough that he didn’t have to sweep the area with the ice bucket before pulling himself into a kneeling position before the door. He knocked on it with the side of his fist, hard, five times in succession. When he heard nothing in the pause that came after, he slammed another volley against the door. This time, in the quiet that anteceded it, he heard a patient female voice – not Theda’s – say, “Who’s out there?”

"It… it’s Bruce,” he said, positive that Theda would recognize him immediately… He would be the first person she would think to find, now that the walls between his dreams and reality had been forcibly torn down, wouldn’t he? He was going to save her, and she was going to owe him. Big time. He couldn't wait to hear what stories she had to tell him. He didn't know it, but he looked forward to the moment when she would speak to him that way again in much the same way as an addict looks toward the bliss of his next high.

There was a long pause, and the voice that still wasn’t Theda’s came back through the wood. “H—hi, Bruce,” she said. “I’m Sheryl… and Kerren’s here too.” The voice sounded hesitant, as if unsure whether polite introductions so soon after half the world had collapsed were really apropos. But Bruce knew she must be leaving someone out.

“And Theda?” he asked, the sound of her name sounding strange on his lips. He only realized at that moment that had never spoken it aloud, outside of his dreams.

“Sorry?” the woman who called herself Sheryl said, as if confused. She followed quickly with, “She's hurt. Can you get through the door?”

That made the situation clear to Bruce. Theda wasn’t unwilling to respond, but unable. His resolve swelled inside him, and he suddenly felt as brave as he ever had. This was his chance to turn the tables, to be her savior in the physical world when she couldn’t be his in the mental. The one bright spot of the door provided by the feeble light was the crescent of the sculpted brass doorknob. He reached up gingerly, wanting to see if it would turn, even though he knew the women inside the room had most likely locked the door before retiring. It turned only an eighth of an inch or so before stopping. “The door’s locked,” he said. “Can you reach it?”

“I don’t think so,” Sheryl called back. “The bed’s wedged in the little hallway to the door somehow, and it’s completely black. I don’t know what’s going on between here and there.”

Bruce nodded to himself, sizing up the door itself now. It was a good point; for all they knew, there might be no floor at all between the door and where the women were. After thinking a moment, he said, “Hold on, I’m gonna try to…” He raised the ice bucket and swung it back, aiming for the doorknob. He hoped that this rustic lodge was about to prove its authenticity by providing ice buckets that were sturdier than the lockplates of its doors.

Two screams erupted from the other side of the door the first time the bucket hit the doorknob. When neither collided object seemed affected, Bruce realized he didn’t have the leverage he needed to see which one would break first. He took a second to brace himself against the doorframe, and stood as best he could. He hadn’t been able to tell from his crawl down the carpet runner, but there really was a cant to the hallway floor. He recalibrated, swung his arm in a bigger arc and gave it a downward trajectory. The ice bucket came down on the doorknob from above this time, and while the effect was just as negligible, it sounded better and felt more satisfying as the shock traveled up his arm. And there were no screams from within the room.

After a few more hits (and the beginnings of cracking, barely-holding-together sounds from the ice bucket), Bruce realized that he was going to need even more force. He braced himself sideways against the door jamb, raised his foot, and hoped that the padded sole of his hotel slipper would be enough to protect his foot from whatever was going to happen next. For Theda, he would have risked it in bare feet. The pain of the first hit went straight to his hip, sharply reminding him of his age, and general paucity of activity in the second half of his life. But he kept at it, the kicks picking up pace so that he wouldn’t have time to consider how each made him feel before he landed another.

It took at least a dozen kicks before he felt anything other than metal solid as bedrock beneath his sole, and by then his ankle was burning, furious with him for this gross misappropriation of what little strength it had. First he heard the knob rattling a little in its lockplate, then heard it rattling a lot. Then it was wobbling, and finally, just when his foot started feeling like there was a blowtorch being applied to his instep, the knob fell off, letting out a surprisingly quiet thump as it hit a bunched-up section of the carpet runner and rolled a few inches.

Bruce bent down to where the knob had been, probed with his fingers to see if the mechanism had been dislocated. It had, a little bit. But he still couldn’t get it to move much, and now there wasn’t even the knob to grab onto. “Hey in there,” he called, surprisingly loudly now that the thudding kicks had ceased. “I’m not sure if this is helping… can you get to the door and see if it’s unlocked now?”

There was a long pause, deep within the room beyond the door. “Um, I don’t think so,” a voice said. “There’s seriously no light in here. I’m not going to leave my wife here alone.”

Bruce’s brow furrowed, confused by their lack of concern for the injured person in the room with them. “What about Theda? Is she going to be okay?”

Another pause, even longer this time. The two women who had announced themselves seemed to be having some kind of whispered conversation. Bruce strained to hear, until the one who called herself Sheryl called back, “She can’t get to the door either. Is there anyone else who can help?” Bruce stared at the door a moment longer, then turned his head toward where he knew the lobby was. It had seemed so far away when he had fallen to the floor in the hallway, but in his efforts to find where Theda was, he found that he had made it most of the way to the bend in the corridor that led toward the main stairs. And now there was some sort of movement down there. He squinted his eyes in the dimness, until he found that there were shadows subtly shifting around. A light source was moving around somewhere outside of his field of vision, maybe a flashlight or lantern swinging around. “Hold on in there, ladies,” Bruce said, still looking toward the light. “I’m going to get help. Sit tight.”

“Okay,” came the voice from inside the room, although it did not sound very sure.