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.
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