For a long time, none of them moved. Seeing Dale bent down, his massive shoulders heaving as he silently sobbed over Glenda's cooling body, was nearly impossible to stand. But they all sat quietly, patiently waiting, unwillingly sharing in this tragic moment together. Kelly had stood up from her position seated on the front edge of the sled and Manoj, turning to sit on the back part of the seat, had scooted around to accommodate her. He wrapped his arms around her from behind, her gloved hands tenderly coming to rest on his mittened ones. Even in this comforting pose, Manoj felt stunned more than anything else. He had never seen death up this close, and frankly was having more trouble processing it than he could have guessed.
This was the result of his relatively protected life, he knew. Both his parents and all four grandparents were far away, but still alive. And since he was a child, he had been steeped in gaming culture, where death and injury were regarded as inconveniences, and the discovery of a health pack or a flick of the Restart button could put everything right. Vanquished enemies usually took only a few seconds to disappear from sight.
But this was entirely outside his realm of experience. The specter of death, thrust on him like this, after they had all survived so much already, threatened to force his mind into retreat. He felt the impulse to detach from it all, to hold onto the warm, living force that was Kelly and draw from her strength, to experience nothing else until he was ready to return. He might have done just this, if he hadn't felt Kelly's lips pressing against him. She had surreptitiously turned toward him within his enclosing arms, and brought the soft heat of her mouth up against his. The urge to mentally check out completely flipped over, and her presence was suddenly all he needed. When she pulled back after a long moment, they looked into each other's eyes.
"Thank you," he mouthed. She nodded, the corners of her mouth turning up just a little bit, as if she was aware of what she had just done for him. Her marveled at her; she was so intuitive, so often seeming to know exactly what he was thinking. He couldn't help but wonder if Dale and Glenda had that kind of bond, if they had ever had the chance to find out.
Dale was standing up. The four surviving members of his team looked at him, wondering what he was going to do next. He stood over Glenda's body for a while, the blood-soaked coverings, the protruding handle of the knife, and just looked down at the sorry tableau for a moment, as if to make sure it was permanently registered in his mind. Then he spun, and headed back to the head of the snowmobile/sledge rig.
Kelly spoke to him as he passed. "Dale...?" Couched in that one word was a world of empathy, reassurance, and questions.
He didn't respond at first, instead threw a leg over the seat just in front of Manoj, who was still facing backward. Dale said something under his breath, and it took several seconds for the sounds to register in Manoj's brain as: "I'm still taking her home."
When it became clear that Dale's intention was to press on, the remaining passengers scrambled to find a place to sit. Sheryl quickly stepped to where Kelly had been sitting, just as the athlete was preparing to get back down onto the sledge. Stopping her, Sheryl put a hand on her arm and said, "You stay with your love. I want to stay with mine." Saying this, she looked back at Kerren, who had seemed to have calmed down somewhat, but was still clearly wishing she was able to get up and run away. Unsure of quite how to sit, Sheryl tried to position herself the way Kelly had been, feet planted against the back of the snowmobile to keep the sledge from bumping into it.
While Kelly tried to help Sheryl get set, Manoj turned back around to the front. Dale had got himself back over the handlebars, hunched over them, but not yet restarting the engine. Manoj placed a hand on the big man's shoulder, but couldn't think of a meaningful thing to say. After a few moments where Manoj wasn't sure that Dale knew he was making this gesture, the security guard gave a long, slow nod. Manoj took this as acknowledgement, and removed his hand.
Sheryl and Kelly had finished their exchange of information, and before Kelly spun around and took her place as the rearmost occupant of the snowmobile, Manoj threw his leg up and over it, dismounting. "Scoot up," he told her.
"Yeah?" she said.
He nodded. "You'll be warmer, and... I want to hold you as tightly as I can."
Kelly seemed to understand that this was more than just a matter of temperature and proximity. She nodded back, and scooted up against Dale's back. She slipped her fingers through the sidemost loops of the driver's belt, clearly having noted how Sheryl had been riding earlier. Manoj slid up close against her, wrapping his arms tightly around her middle. He felt her rest her head back against his shoulder for a moment, before Dale started the snowmobile's engine and they resumed their downward trek.
Manoj tried not to think about Glenda too much. He acknowledged the loss, and knew there would be time for true grieving later, but there were other pressing matters that were coming to the surface, now that taking care of her severe injury wasn't top priority. Part of him realized how callous this was to think, and he would never say it out loud to anyone (maybe not even to Kelly, which was something he would never have considered before this), but he at least could comfort himself by calling it self-preservation. And maybe that's all it was. He forced himself to focus on his view of the town below, because there was something strange about it.
The image hadn't changed much, even though they had drawn much closer to it; it clearly filled more of his vision than it had before. What was bothering him, though, was that it wasn't any more distinct than it had been up at the Lodge. The effect gave his mind a slight queasiness, as if aware that it was being shown an illusion, but unsure of its origin. It actually reminded him of when he had looked at the orange full moon on the horizon as a child, and noted how it seemed much larger, much closer than when it was high in the sky. He had already heard that this was a trick of the mind, that the moon was actually a few thousand miles closer to the Earth when high overhead as opposed to when it first rose, and understood the geometry of this, but he still couldn't shake the feeling that there was magnification going on. So what was it, then? Some kind of refractory property of the Earth's atmosphere, maybe the same kind that gave the moon that mildly unnerving sunset color? It seemed so clearly that it was, so why were his eyes deceiving him?
He finally convinced himself that it really was an illusion with an argument he came up with all on his own. If the moon really was larger when on the horizon, then at that time its features should be clearer. But as long as he looked at the orb low on the horizon and high, with binoculars and without, night after night, he realized that nothing was more distinct, no lava plain or mountain that looked any closer or clearer just after moonrise. He was forced to accept that the giant harvest moon was a myth, playing against the mind's understanding that, in every earthly case, an object on the horizon has to be much bigger than an overhead object with the same apparent size.
He was experiencing that same disorientation now. The town was there, definitively closer, but also remote somehow. Looking at it, he didn't like the way it made his brain feel. It gave him the sense that they were going to be going down this hill forever, perhaps losing more of their band one by one, never really reaching the base of the mountain.
His hands instinctively tightened around Kelly's middle, and she removed one hand from Dale's belt long enough to grasp his fingers in hers for a brief, reassuring moment. This put Manoj's mind as much at ease as it could, which was why he missed the change in their surroundings. By the time he realized it, it was too late to warn Kelly, so that she could warn Dale, or to change anything about the speed they were traveling.
The air around them had started to lighten. It wasn't an intensification of the moonlight, or the warm light of dawn (which he couldn't help but doubt they were ever going to see again). It wasn't even because of snow being kicked up around them, or falling from the sky. This lightness was the same as if someone were slowly cranking up the brightness, a fade-out but to bright white. And being a programmer, he instinctively sensed what this kind of transition meant. He saw it all the time, when game designers needed to mask an abrupt transition.
They were being taken from where they were, and brought to some other place. By the time this thought had fully formed in his mind, the world around them had gone to an impenetrable no-color, and the wind shifted direction.
-11.4-
Dale welcomed the white. It gave the only sense of relief he had felt since he had seen the blade disappear into Glenda's chest. Take it all away, he thought. Let it be wiped clean. Take away every bit of everything he was feeling. He would never have to reach the bottom of the hill, never need to give up responsibility for the people he hadn't failed yet. He wouldn't have to deliver Glenda to anyone else; she would be with him forever and he wouldn't have to give her up. He'd be perfectly fine with that. Let the white come. Let this be the end.
This was the second time he saw someone he loved die. Yes, he had loved his father, in that strange, distant way that many fathers and sons loved each other. Back then, he hadn't tried to save the person in peril. This time, he had done everything he could, and the result was the same. Did any of it matter, then? He had spent the larger part of his life trying to protect those around him, in any way he could, and this was the final result of it, hauling a bunch of people he barely knew and the body of the woman he loved to... where?
Whatever the white finally proved to be, it wasn't the end. After too short a time, the world slowly returned, like a fader knob being turned back down from overload. He didn't know what he had been expecting, but it certainly wasn't more of the same. But here they were, heading down the side of the same mountain, with the only difference that the terrain was somewhat flatter, not as many trees to look out for. There was only one major deviation from the flat paleness, which was some sort of outcropping far ahead, where something dark was pushing up through the thick, pervasive covering of snow...
Dale was not a man who swore easily. He'd never thought about it much, but Glenda had pointed it out to him on more than one occasion, so it must have been true. He didn't know why this was, he just never felt the need to express himself that way. There always seemed to be other words, better words, when the time came to say them. But when the outcropping grew closer, however, and he began to suspect what it was, only to see that thought realized, crystallizing before his eyes, he muttered a phrase under his breath that he knew would have delighted Glenda for its rarity.
"Oh, God damn it."
The outcropping was really a large building, downslope from them, partially smashed where the leading edge of the avalanche must have punched it down. The junction of the L-shaped wings was the least covered part of it, sheltered for the most part, but the nearer side was piled high with snow, which spread out over the entire roof and had most likely spilled copiously over the front...
It was the Deertail Lodge. They had somehow circled around and were now approaching it again, this time from the back. He had no idea how it had happened, but that didn't change the fact that it had. He felt all the strength drain out of his arms; after all this, they had just come back around to where they started. They hadn't made any progress at all. Instead of delivering her into the arms of her family, Dale had brought Glenda back to the place where she had been fatally injured.
He braked them to a stop, and shut off the engine. There was a little bit of rustling behind him, but no words, as his passengers looked around him, individually recognizing the Lodge on the slope below them. They all knew what its existence in front of them implied. For a long time, they just sat there. The wind stirred a little, died before it really became anything.
"It looped us," Manoj finally said. "We hit the boundary, and it took us back to the far edge. Toroidal space." No one asked what that meant. All they needed to know was that there was no way out.
"We've got to get back inside," they heard Sheryl say from the back of the group. "We'll freeze out here." Meaning that Kerren, immobile low to the ground, would freeze first. Dale nodded to himself, knowing that what she said was true. But he had half a mind just to get up off the snowmobile, lie down on the sledge next to Glenda, and wait for whatever new, pointless event was going to come next. Maybe he would just wait there until he froze, joining Glenda in a more intimate way than he had ever managed to in life. It was only force of habit, his ridiculous instinct to help others, that made him start the engine and let the vehicle start sliding downhill again.
He didn't quite know where to go. From this new, higher vantage point, he could assess more of the damage the avalanche had done. He could see how the crushing weight of the snow had almost entirely destroyed the side of the Lodge where Bruce had pulled Kerren out from under her bed. The author's own room, which he said he had been near when the deluge came, was nonexistent. Before he could stop to think about how Bruce could have possibly survived, he saw the restaurant, which stuck out from the first floor near where the crumbled wing spilled its guts down the slope. It was strange; although he could make out the bulk of the restaurant's lone chimney, he couldn't make out any of its roof.
So he couldn't circle around to the front of the Lodge that way. The area at the junction of the L-shaped wings looked out, too. The snow hadn't piled up very high there, but the doors on the bottom floor (which were mostly staff access to the utility areas) were entirely covered, and getting any of this group up to the level of the second-floor rooms would be both dangerous and difficult.
Then there was the closest side, near where the wreckage of the ski lift was piled up against the very shed they had departed from. That wreckage, all the thick, tangled cable, and towers bent like toothpicks, was only partly covered by the snow. He couldn't go that way, either... he had no way of knowing how much twisted metal was lurking just under the snow to snatch their wheels out from under them, or how far the debris field extended up the slope.
He felt the futility of all this pressing in on him again. He imagined himself pulling the snowmobile back into that tiny garage, returning to where Glenda had last been alive, and there had been hope of getting away from this place. Now he had nothing, and all the support of the other people in his group wasn't going to get him to pretend that he did.
Which brought him to the closest wing of the Lodge. It was still intact as far as he could tell, and the way the snow had spread broadside across its roof, making it all but perfectly flush with the new slope of the mountain, it was starting to take on a familiar form, one that the Deertail had never had before, but that nature had fashioned, seemingly just for him.
That was when an exhilarating horror rose in him, breaking like the dawn that he was increasingly more sure would never come. That near wing, from the point where the snow stopped at new ground level, to the front, fifty feet up, looked an awful lot like a ski jump. Even the thin lines of chimneys protruding from the shallowest parts of the snow looked like guide lines, leading right up to the roof's front edge.
He swiveled the handlebars in that direction. He wondered how long it would take before his passengers realized, once the snowmobile started skating across the roof shingles, that Dale had no intention of stopping until they were plunging, snowmobile and sledge and all, off the far end of the roof. To fly, to see the whiteness rising to meet him, and then to hurt no more. To go with Glenda on their first and last journey together. It made perfect sense.
He pressed his foot harder on the accelerator.
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