His tone was frightening. Annie clung to my grandfather and made him walk close to the old man. It was clear the old man didn't have enough clothes on. He staggered and leaned hard on my grandfather.
They kept moving down the slight grade. They saw no sky and little of anything else. The snow was like a miniature of the City's Dome, except that this dome floated over them as they walked. Its edges were only about fifty yards off.
"Where are the Outsiders?" my grandfather asked. "Aren't there people here?"
"They're miles away," Arch told him. "And indoors. Only fools and youngsters are out in this blizzard."
"Fools is right," Annie said tartly. "There was supposed to be sky. And there isn't."
Old Arch staggered again. To my grandfather he said, "Could—could you carry my pack?"
My grandfather took it and they went on, stumbling blindly through knee-deep drifts, getting more and more chilled and less and less comfortable, 'til they came to a small clump of trees with a solidly frozen creek running through it.
Here Old Arch made a lean-to shelter of windfallen limbs. Annie and my grandfather helped as soon as they understood the design. Arch spread part of his bed over the lean-to, breaking the force of the wind, and put the rest inside. Just outside, on a place scraped bare of snow, he built the first wood fire my grandfather and Annie had ever seen.
