REAMDE

This brought up a vague memory: the Schloss had emergency flashlights plugged into wall outlets, one in each room, charging all the time, except when the power went off.

 

Forcing herself to move in slow, careful steps—she didn’t want to trip and sprawl on broken glass—she crossed the room, felt her way down the wall, and found the flashlight. It came on, dazzlingly bright. She clapped her palm over it, not wanting to present an obvious target for someone peering through gunsights into the building, and allowed a blade of light to escape between fingers, illuminating the path out of the office.

 

She exited into a corridor and headed away from the main entrance. To the right was a row of offices and of storerooms that mostly contained kitchen equipment. To the left was the main food prep area for the tavern. Making a quick pass through there, she risked taking her hand off the light—the kitchen had no windows—and plucked a long sharp-pointed butcher knife and a smaller paring knife from a magnetic strip on the wall. These she dropped into a white plastic pail that was sitting on the floor beneath a sink. Using that as a kind of shopping basket she swiped a few odds and ends that might come in handy—two oven mitts, for example, that might serve to keep her hands warm if she couldn’t find anything better. There was, of course, no perishable food stored in the place, since it had been shut down for Mud Month. From a fridge she collected a bottle of canola oil that had been left there so it wouldn’t go rancid, and scored some twenty-ounce plastic bottles of water. Cabinets yielded some sacks of potato chips and other snacks, as well as rice, raisins, pasta. The bucket was approaching full, and she reckoned she had enough calories in there to keep her alive for days, provided she could find a way to cook the stuff.

 

Which led her to the idea of camping stoves, and other equipment. Was that too much to hope for, in a ski lodge in the mountains?

 

Someone was banging on the lodge’s front door in an exploratory way, trying to figure out how much force would be required to break it down.

 

Why didn’t they just shoot out the locks? They certainly had the means.

 

Because they were afraid that gunfire might be heard down the valley.

 

Uncle Richard had guns here. A fine thought. But impossible. They were stored in a safe in his apartment.

 

She had the general sense that outdoor gear tended to be stored in the building’s basement. An emergency map posted on the wall told her where the stairways were. She found one and descended it.

 

A window shattered somewhere in the front of the building.

 

She was almost overcome, for a moment, by the impulse to flee. But that would just end up with her being dead of hypothermia.

 

Her nose told her that she was right about the camping equipment. It wasn’t a bad smell exactly, but all camping gear smelled the same after a while. She shone the light around and found the stuff she needed, strewn all over the floor.

 

Of course. If Jones had forced Richard to accompany him, Richard would have needed his own backpack, warm clothes, sleeping bag, tent. They must have come down here and ransacked the place.

 

So this, at least, was going her way. She nearly tripped over an empty backpack: a big rig with an external aluminum frame. She set the pail down, snatched up the pack, and verified that it was in decent repair. She grabbed a sleeping bag, already jammed into a stuff sack, and lashed it onto the frame with a couple of bungee cords. She dumped the pail into the top compartment indiscriminately and was reminded that there were a couple of knives in the bottom. Storing those would be tricky, so she set them aside for now.

 

Green nylon tarps, neatly folded into rectangles, were stacked on a shelf. She grabbed three of them. One, if she cut a hole through the middle, might serve as a rain poncho. Another could be a ground cloth, the third a makeshift tent. She pawed some hanks of rope from another shelf, a CamelBak from a hook where it had been stored upside down to drain.

 

The lodge had collected so many old used ski parkas, pants, and gloves that they were stored in garbage bags in the corners. She ripped two of these open and kicked through them, selecting a coat and some snow pants more for their color (black) than their size (too large), and grabbed two pairs of gloves in navy blue. A stocking cap. A pair of ski goggles, since she didn’t have sunglasses, and might find herself on snow.

 

The backpack was stiffening up as she jammed stuff into it. She circled back to the knives and figured out a way to insert them carefully between the pack’s aluminum frame and its nylon sack. They’d stay put there, but the blades weren’t in a position to hurt her, or damage the other gear. The handles protruded from the top of the pack; she’d be able to reach back over her left shoulder and grab them if she had to.

 

A sharp scent was in her nostrils: stove fuel. She opened the nearest cabinet door and found a compartment where they kept camp stoves and supplies.

 

The jihadists seemed to be giving her all the time in the world. Someone was banging around upstairs, but only one person, as far as she could tell.

 

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