"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.
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