Glenda wanted Dale. Desperately, with a passion and immediacy she had never felt before. What was worse, she almost said it aloud, as she threw her body down on the couch in frustration. The words had been piled up behind her teeth, ready to burst out, but she hadn't let them, instead straining them between her lips so they came out in one unintelligible ululation. She felt terrible, freaking out in front of a guest like this. She hated for anybody, customer or staff, to see her at anything less than her best: her biggest smile, her most helpful attitude. But in this moment, with two people she deeply cared about out of her reach, one upstairs in the hall and one buried out in the snow, she just couldn't hang on another second. She lost it.
She felt terrible as this forbidden thought formed in her mind. In a moment like this, her first instinct should have been to call out for her husband. Or her kids. Or even a simple "I want to go home!" would have been appropriately pitiful. But more than anything else, she had wanted to summon the burly security guard who was, at that moment, upstairs helping people who were surely in much more dire circumstances than she was. So selfish.
Her face pressed deep into the soft fabric of one of the lobby's sizeable throw pillows. She took a deep breath of its dusty surface, trying to breathe in the dust of the world as it used to be through its fibers, and then allowed herself one sob, a hard, potentially rib-cracking one. The pillow did its job well, letting her vent her frustrated sadness, her mourning for this revelation that it took a literal avalanche for her to admit to herself. Then her moment of weakness passed. She turned her focus toward pulling herself together.
Glenda lifted her head up as quickly as she had thrown it down, and looked at the man standing with the walkie in his hand, which was still clicking out its desperate message in measured rhythm. She hoped that the tears she could feel burning the corners of her eyes wouldn't choose that moment to spill down her cheeks.
"I want Dale," she said, and almost drew her head back and clamped her hand on her mouth like a cartoon character, before she realized that the words had actually sounded more like, "We've got to help him." Exactly like that, in fact.
"Yeah," the man said, his brow furrowing as he half-concentrated on the clicks coming from the walkie. He appeared to be choosing his words carefully. "I don't think he's going to last long out there."
Glenda nodded, wishing he would turn away, so she could swipe the back of her hand over her eyes and keep them from betraying her vulnerability. He didn't. He seemed to be waiting for her to say something, to make a proclamation about their next course of action. She didn't have any, so she said, "My name's Glenda. And you're--" she pointed at him, trying to match her memory of his checking in with some blonde girl that afternoon to the name he had given...
"Manoj," he said. "I'm here with my girlfriend Kelly." Glenda nodded at this, as if it had just been on the tip of her mind, and then the two of them stared at each other a little longer. The clicks continued.
Manoj managed to say, "And the person on the other end of this is..." He swiveled the walkie in her direction.
"Harmon," she said. "He's not a guest, he's... well, he's sort of a resident. It's a long story. One that I don't know much of. He was acting weird tonight. Actually, he walked out suddenly a little while ago..." She hadn't even had the following thought until it was coming out of her mouth. "Do you think he knew, somehow?"
Manoj shrugged. She sighed, knowing this man had no idea who Harmon was, or what she was even talking about. Why couldn't Dale still be here?
"Is there any way to get outside?" Manoj asked, nodding at the broken front door. "If there's someone out there, we need to try to get to him as soon as we can."
Glenda followed his gaze, trying to think. Dale might be able to break through that door, get out to the equipment building, or at least hold her tightly enough that she might feel safe and warm again. "There's a pair of snowmobiles out in the shed, but I don't know how--" She threw a hand in the direction of the snow piled up against the huge windows, only now noticing that it had creeped even higher up while she'd been exploring the office and having her tantrum. Only about two feet of moonlight showed through now. In a matter of minutes, the lobby might be entirely dark too. "If Harmon's telling us he's next to the service road... that thing's miles long. It goes all the way down into town. But of course you know that, you drove up it earlier."
Manoj nodded gravely. The road was been long and winding, lots of switchbacks as it rose up the side of the mountain that had recently decided to revolt against them all.
Manoj appeared to be thinking hard, quietly, for so long that Glenda thought he had gone back to analyzing Harmon's desperate message of clicks. Or maybe he was just freaking out in his own quiet way. Whatever... she just knew that she wanted someone to come along and relieve her of all her Stuff She Had To Deal With right now, and she knew exactly who she wanted that someone to be.
A mental light went on, and Manoj came back from wherever he had gone. "Does this place have an attic?" he asked her.
For a moment, she honestly didn't know. But then she remembered that there was a place in the second-floor ceiling that looked like those pull-down attic doors. "I think so... I've never been up there, but I think I know how we can get in. If it isn't too damaged, that is."
The young man nodded thoughtfully a few more moments, and for a second Glenda could tell just by looking at him that he was really smart. Like, amazingly so, in a way she never could be. She bet that blonde girl -- Kelly -- appreciated him for that. Glenda saw flashes of that same esoteric brilliance in Dale sometimes, but most of the time he was just *him*, strong and down-to-earth and tack-sharp...
"If they have roof access," Manoj was musing, "we might be able to get down somehow. The snow didn't entirely block our second-floor windows, so there might be a clear way. Like you said, if the roof held up..." Manoj looked like he was going to lapse into another fugue, but then he made a mad dash for the stairs. "Come on, then! Who knows if there'll be another avalanche, so we've got to hurry!"
Glad to have a course of action to take -- any action at all -- Glenda ran up the stairs toward Dale just as fervently as Manoj ran toward Kelly. Still wrapped in only his white bathrobe, he turned left at the top of the stairs. Before Glenda followed she turned, and looked down at her lobby from up above. Even though her eyes should have been adjusting to the low light, the added snow piling against the windows balanced it with new darkness. The place looked no more familiar now than it had in those first instants.
She wondered if she was looking at this little arena of her life for the last time. Quickly on the heels of this was the thought that, as long as Dale was ahead of her, at the end of the corridor, she didn't care if it was the last time. She turned and ran after the white shape that was already blurring into the gloom ahead of her.
-4.4-
Kelly assumed that Manoj was still behind her. She was focused solely on the light dancing far ahead. It had tumbled around a little, as if the flashlight had been dropped, but it had been recovered. The man carrying had turned a corner, but she could still see the way it flickered as he swept it around, and she could hear vague sounds of several people calling to each other over the slap of her slippers against the uneven hall carpet. Their voices seemed strangely distant, however; sound didn't seem to be carrying the way you'd think it should in this jumbled, wooden funhouse. Kelly pushed that thought aside. Everything but one goal fell away; to reach the source of that wavering light.
This was something that had always been easy for her, to slip into this state of concentration. She had been told this was why she was always so good at whatever she tried; she had a innate sense of determination, a way of shutting out the world and seeing only the thing she was trying to accomplish. To her, it wasn't even a matter of getting her body to move faster, or push it harder. It was seeing the place she needed to get to, and not getting distracted until she was there.
She knew Manoj didn't have the same outlook. If a person were to examine their relationship, there were many places in which that statement would apply. It was a fact she didn't pay much attention to, although she knew he did, enough for the both of them. She was still trying to get him to realize that their differences didn't really mean anything to her, but it was hard for him to not analyze everything six ways to Sunday. She knew this, and forgave him for it... most of the time.
She was actually grinning as she ran down the hall, and realized the reason why shortly after: when she was young, she and a childhood friend sometimes would run up and down the hall when they got into slap-happy giggling fits late at night during sleepovers. Her friend's explanation for why such an activity was good for stopping a raucous gale of laughter: "Because there isn't anything funny about running down the hall". There might not be, but sometimes it just felt good.
This was more her speed: action over cognition. She actually was running a little faster than she knew she should be; without the direct beam of the flashlight before her, she was almost running blind. There was an increase in light as she passed by a wide opening in the wall that she knew led down the main stairs to the lobby, but once she was past that illumination, she was only going by faint impressions of what was in front of her. She didn't care, was only concerned with her own forward motion.
She came to the corner, only slowing down when she was worried that her sudden eruption out of nowhere would startle the security guard, which is what she assumed the big guy with the light was. She moved forward, and peeked around the corner, assessing the situation. What she saw was odd; he was alone in the corridor, totally unmoving, shining his light through a severely broken door into one of the lodge's rooms. Now she wished she had paid more attention to what the voices were saying as she had run down the hall toward them.
A voice called out from somewhere far behind Kelly. "Dale? ... Dale!!"
Kelly saw the security guard wince, shifting his weight as if he wanted to drop the flashlight and run toward the sound but couldn't. He braced the flashlight in both hands, straining to keep it focused inside the doorway. Finally, after working his lips with silent agitation, he called back, "Kind of got a situation here, Glenda! Hang on."
"Harmon's calling in!" came the voice again, and this time the guard actually looked away from his task. Kelly instinctively ducked back, behind the corner. There was no reason she didn't want to be seen. Her body had just reacted before her mind. More words came drifting up. "He's in trouble!"
Kelly couldn't see the man, but she knew he was even more troubled by this. "Hang on, honey..." he said finally, through clenched jaw muscles. "I'll be there in a minute!"
As she puzzled on what this exchange could mean, she noticed that beyond the guard, the corridor quickly devolved into a jagged, roof-high pile of heaped timbers and insulation, from which the slightest whiff of outside air emanated. She started heard new sounds coming from inside the room. There was a scraping of wood against wood, a half-screamed woman's voice -- "Hey!" -- and then the sounds of large quantities of cloth being dragged across each other.
"No!" the voice barked. "Let go of her!" Then, sounding a little defeated, the same voice: "Please, watch her legs..." More sliding and scraping followed. There was something on the floor down by the guard's foot, and it took Kelly a few moments of study before she realized what it was: a doorknob, presumably from the shattered portal he was now shining his light into. It dawned on her that he was holding it steady for the benefit of the people inside the room, although exactly who that was remained unclear. For the moment, they were quiet.
She took this break in the action to step out into the corridor. She made sure to step heavily, hoping to draw attention without startling a man who might have a weapon of some sort. Fortunately, the floor underneath her creaked, and the guard's head managed to whip toward her without changing the position of the flashlight.
"It's me," she said, raising her hands.
"Hey," he said, nodding to her before looking back into the room. "You okay? You should have stayed in your room." He was still talking to her, although he was looking into the room beyond them.
"Sure, we're..." She had just noticed that Manoj was nowhere to be found. "We're okay. What's going on in there? I'm Kelly, by the way."
The security guard nodded without looking at her, absently intoned, "Dale."
A woman's bare legs came into view, floating horizontally out of the door at about waist height, and Kelly almost screamed. The flashlight brutally revealed that those limbs were bloody, and slightly twisted in a way they shouldn't have been. Her hands flew to her mouth, mind reeling in the bizarrity of the scene, but then the woman came a little farther out of the room and it all made sense.
She was being carried in a man's arms, gingerly moved through the broken frame of the doorway. He stepped over the threshold sideways, with his back to Kelly. He was wearing a plain white t-shirt and a pair of dark lounge pants. She could tell from the love handles and balding head that he was well into middle age, even though she couldn't see his face. He came slowly through the door, taking long careful steps. His arms didn't look particularly muscular, but he seemed strong, because he moved as steadily if he weren't carrying anything.
The carried woman's face was the last thing to come into view, her head and shoulders lolled back over he savior's other arm. Her hair, long and curled in the way Kelly wished hers could be, trailed down toward the floor, illuminated by the flashlight so much that it acted as a secondary light source for the dark hallway. The security guard backed up, allowing the man/woman pair the space to turn once they were in the open.
"That doesn't look good," Dale exhaled.
A third form drifted through the door. It was another woman, this one darker than the pale, beatific form that had just been carried over the threshold like a bride. This one walked carefully, palms out, evenly balanced as if she were partially responsible for the steadiness of the man holding the unconscious woman, her face drawn with fear. "Careful..." she breathed, which could have been a plea to any of them there. "Be careful with her..."
"She's fine," the older man breathed, his voice being the first thing to provide evidence that he didn't do this sort of thing professionally. His teeth were gritted tightly.
Kelly couldn't help but speak, just as much as she couldn't take her eyes off those broken legs. "What happened?"
"Damned avalanche," the older man said as if Kelly were only speaking generally, turning a little in her direction. This movement elicited two gasps, one from the woman behind him, worried that he was going to lose his grip on what he was carrying, and one from Kelly, who suddenly recognized the man. "Bruce Casey?" she blurted.
He seemed to give a little sigh, his shoulders somehow drooping without lowering the woman in his arms, and nodded to the general populous. No one seemed to think this was an unusual coincidence save for Kelly. "What are you--?" she began.
Dale jumped in, keeping the focus where it should be. "Here," he said, motioning with his free hand. "Pass her to me. I can get her down to the lobby. There's not as much damage down there." There would be time to gush over the celebrity later, Kelly realized. Right now there was an injured woman to tend to.
Bruce looked at him for a long moment, as if he were reluctant to give up this burden to anyone else, albeit someone much more qualified to handle it. "It's okay. I can make it, I think."
The fragile-looking woman behind them spoke up. "Let's just get her somewhere safe. Hurry! We don't know if all this is over yet."
She was right. Kelly instinctively moved forward and took the shaken woman's hand. After nearly recoiling in shock, those wild eyes grew a little calmer and her palm relaxed against Kelly's. At least a little. "It'll be okay. I'm Kelly."
"Sheryl."
"We'll get her someplace safe. All of us together. Let's go." She said this more loudly, to make sure that everyone knew she was speaking to them all.
The five of them, led by the Dale's flashlight, started moving down the hallway back to the lobby. Bruce led the way, the others ready to jump forward if they saw his arms start to tremble from the weight he carried.
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