Glenda hadn't seen any of skirmish between Dale and Bruce. As soon as Dale brought his arm down and back up, his broad back was eclipsing what was going on. She heard flesh slapping against flesh, saw Dale's shoulders tense underneath his uniform, and then the pair of men swung around like partners doing some kind of drunken dance.
Dale stumbled, which was something she had never seen him do. His feet seemed always sure, always steady. This idea made her hesitate with its novelty, or else she would have been out of the way when Bruce came out from behind the security guard, extended arm first. Her mind registered something thin and glimmering.
The author was stumbling too, but the way Dale held his arm made the shiny thing in his hand surprisingly steady. It came right at her, and she had only started to think she should probably move out of its path when it reached her. Strangely enough, she only felt a whisper, like a bit of wind blowing through her, as the shine passed just under her left collarbone and disappeared. Bruce's fist came to rest right up against her shirt there, and for a second after he fell to the ground, she just looked at the chunk of sculpted wood -- contoured with depressions for a person to tuck their fingers into -- sticking to her.
The fire feeling came all at once, spreading out as if she had been ignited from the spot where the handle touched her. It drew her breath out of her lungs, erased her sense of time and space. Dale, once he had finished pushing Bruce to the floor, turned to her, and for what felt like the longest time just stood there, looking at her. She looked back at him, incredulous. She simultaneously had no idea what had just happened, and could see every possible consequence of the coming seconds spreading out into the future like the fine fibers of a net.
Then her knees were not doing what they were designed to, failing to hold her up. She tipped backward, but Dale managed to grab her and sit her down on the floor. She landed hard, but not as hard as if he had not been there. He was speaking to her, but the pain was making it hard to hear -- or think -- clearly. There was a lot of yelling around her, and more people were piling on top of the author. She abstractly thought that maybe they were trying to cover him up entirely, so that he might disappear. She hoped he would, although she couldn't exactly articulate why.
He was struggling underneath the people trying to hold him. Dale was with them, but he was distracted; he kept looking over at her, and not doing his best to detain her attacker. She stared back at him, because at that moment seeing his eyes looking at her was the best thing occurring, the only thing that even slightly diverted her attention from the burning metal that seemed to be in her blood now, pumping through her body and down the front of her shirt in equal amounts. She could feel the fabric sticking to her. She hated the feel of it, wanted to pull it away from her skin, but her arms seemed to be suddenly asleep.
Dale kept looking back and forth between her and the man pinned under him, like he was struggling to make some sort of decision. The two people in bathrobes were atop the author along with him, and he was speaking to them. He eventually got off Bruce, and came over to her. He put his hands on her shoulders, and when she looked at him this closely, found she couldn't quite focus on him. He was speaking to her, his voice sounding all watery, asking her questions she couldn't answer about someone called Glenda. She felt that she knew who he was talking about, but couldn't quite place a face to the name. She opened her mouth to tell him this, but didn't think anything was coming out.
Dale turned away from her, and with more urgency than before, spoke to everyone else in the room. Kelly and Manoj struggled to keep Bruce down on the floor, but all of a sudden lost the battle. The author was scrambling along the floor like he was doing a child's imitation of a horse, hands and feet slapping the floor, heading straight for her. She was looking afraid, watching for him to reveal another shiny thing that he was going to try to slip through her, but he jumped over her instead. The vibrations of the floorboards hurt as they passed through her, but they eased as he got farther away. He had leapt over her to get to the stairs, and was now rising up and away from her on them. Good. She didn't like him anymore.
Dale was leaning over her, which she liked much better. He was paying a lot of attention to the wooden handle stuck to her chest. She would have tried to brush it off her, if her arms had been working properly, but she somehow knew it wasn't going to make the thumping fire go away even if she did. It was okay, though. Dale was here. He would know what to do...
Why, then, was he turning away from her again? She wanted to call him back, to make sure he wouldn't leave her side. She didn't want him to leave her, ever. She had known that for a long time. But now he was moving away, picking up something... one of the large upholstered chairs that this room had several of. He was moving toward the tall, flat piles of snow at the far end, his muscles tensing...
And then the chair was leaving his hands, flying through the air, tumbling a little through space before a web of white lines spread away from it in a brittle webwork. The lines all fell away, and a cold wind struck her, as if they alone had been holding back the chill. It should have helped quell the fires inside her, but it didn't. She began to shiver while still burning.
By this time, Dale was coming back to her, and she tried to smile for him. She managed to gather enough strength to lift her hands a little and reach for him, like a child silently asking to be picked up. He gently tucked a tentative arm behind her shoulders, and another under her legs, and lifted her up off the floor. She felt his muscles trembling as he did this slowly, and it matched the way she was shivering in a way that almost felt comforting.
Lying across his arms, her head was a little higher than when she was standing up. He floated her toward where the white web had appeared (and just as quickly disappeared), toward the source of that cold wind. Maybe going out into it would cool her, and her body wouldn't burn so much. If Dale was the one taking her there, she knew it would be a better place.
She looked up into Dale's face. The pale moonlight hit his cheeks directly as they moved out into the blowing snow, but her vision was starting to darken around the edges, like the closing iris at the end of a silent-era movie scene. There were tears sliding down both his cheeks, brilliantly lit with whiteness. She wanted to lift her hand to them, to swipe them away and ask what they were for, but her hands wouldn't do even that.
-8.8-
Manoj would have told Harmon what was stalking him, if the older man's walkie had been on. But since the veteran skier had switched his off, Manoj's clicks radiated out into the surrounding atmosphere unheard, and were lost forever. Harmon, for his part, was trying to hold his breath so the thing stalking the woods nearby wouldn't find him.
Harmon had spent enough time in the woods, thanks to his hobby, that he had witnessed all sorts of creatures. This one, however, was confounding him. The way it seemed to move, the irregular path it was treading... but most of all, what frightened him and gave him extra incentive to stay absolutely still was the feeling of intelligent intent behind what he was hearing. The longer he listened, the more he realized that he was hearing something moving through the world in hunt mode. And that he was its prey. Was this how rabbits felt, he wondered, cowering down in their burrows while foxes roamed the world inches above them, razor-sharp teeth and sniffing, searching noses and held close to the ground?
Whatever it was had stopped moving. For a long, dark moment, Harmon was sure that it had located him, and was only relishing the moment before pouncing. But then something happened, something far away. If anything, including him, had been producing sound, Harmon wouldn't have heard it. Far off, and so close to the edge of hearing that he would not be surprised to be told it was his imagination, there was a brittle, splintery sound. The hunter, in whatever odd form it was taking on, immediately pivoted and sped off in another direction. Harmon could only guess that it was toward the distant noise.
He was alone again. He let out his breath, gulped down more as deeply as he dared, so much that his leg ended up moving and flaring in pain again. His breath hitched, he coughed, and then held his breath once again, sure that the thing's acute ears would direct it right back to him. Moments passed, and it didn't return.
Harmon was aware that he couldn't stay where he was. Waiting for people from the Lodge to come find him had been folly from the beginning. And now they had something else to contend with. Maybe whatever they had done would end up buying him enough time to get out of here, to find a new hiding place. But how would he do this? Skis could be used as a decent shovel to dig himself out with, but they happened to be at the far end of his snapped legs -- if they hadn't flown off his feet during the snownami he had been plowed under as it flew down the mountain. With his luck, both of his skis would both be lodged like anchors in the snow, making it impossible for him to move them.
There was a particularly thick branch ahead of him, just a few inches beyond his comfortable reach. He had been eyeing it ever since awakening under the tipped-over tree, and might have even wondered if he would be able to pull himself forward by grabbing it. No doubt, it was the parent of the fine network of twigs above him that was holding back the rest of the snow directly above his head. No matter. The time for waiting had passed. He had to get out.
Steeling his nerves, Harmon reached his gloved hand forward and gripped the branch. Its woody solidity was actually nice to feel in the midst of all this smothering softness. He felt sap locking his fingers into place, and pulled. Fire immediately shot down his leg as it stretched, and Harmon ground his teeth together to keep from crying out. To his surprise, the snow let go of his legs and he slid forward a few inches. He stopped pulling, and took as many deep lungfuls of breath as he could to calm the burning in his chest.
So he could move, a little. Good to know. The only obstacles left to him, then, were the broken ankle itself, and the climb to the surface. He still wasn't sure of how far that was, and then the trip to the Lodge itself. All while under the eye of something that most likely wanted to tear him apart. Easy as pie.
When the pain had started to recede, Harmon realized that not much snow had fallen on him when he pulled on the branch. It was right next to his cheek now, and he was feeling bold, so he made one more experiment. He shook it hard, and ducked his head. As he expected, whooshing waves of snow fell on his head, but not as much as he had feared. When it seemed to be done, he shook off what must have been a sizeable pile on top of his hat, and looked up.
The branch he had shaken spread overhead to a wide swatch of compressed needles and twigs, and with the weight of snow pressing down on it, only a little had sifted through to land on him. But the light above the area he had disturbed was definitely lighter. Quite a bit so, actually. If he had to guess, he thought he might just be another inch or two from the surface.
He braced himself, shook the branch again, making sure to change the direction of his tugs; instead of side to side, this time he went back and forth. This new motion caused more falling snow than before, and he closed his eyes against the stinging onslaught. By the time he stopped, he had dislodged enough snow that he could feel the weight of it starting to press down on his body.
Slowly, Harmon opened his eyes. The change had been immediate and visually brutal. He had opened up the sky. Not only that, but now that the weight of the avalanche had been removed from the branch he had shaken, its smaller ends had been able to reach out and stretch for the first time since the tree had fallen. Harmon grinned to himself as he imagined what that must have looked like from the outside: a needly arm unfurling out of the ground, like a zombie starting to emerge from its grave in one of those novels he obsessively read.
He loved the thrill of coming across visceral moments like that, and they never failed to make goosebumps break out on his skin. He had thought it was because the image was so terrible -- the moment when the sane, real world was breached by the unreal -- but now he was on the other side of the equation, and realized what all those zombies must have felt in that moment of breaking through... ultimate triumph over the death that tried to keep them underground.
He had barely moved and had a long way to go, but now he could see the night sky punched through with stars overhead, and it was amazing how much difference that made.
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