everything except himself

The whole city knew when the boy had hit the tower: everything stopped. Except those people who were standing, starring, video-taping the carnage, everyone was panicked. There’s some ethereal calming feeling, inherent only to humans, to watching a disaster, like how people slow down in cars to look. Only willing to watch, people stand apart from the mess. They take it in as a sort of chance entertainment, not as they would a book or something of importance but as a terrible sort of sideshow to their daily lives.

That’s when it happened. The maintenance man came running out of the pizza shop in a rush, followed with no real sense of the situation by pop.

“Drive my truck over to where the accident is. I’m going to go do what I can!” The maintenance man tossed pop the keys to the ‘truck’ — really, it’s a white service van with the tower company’s logo on the side. On account of the maintenance man being the only real adult in this city full of children, the maintenance man is hereafter referred to plainly as “man”. Not “super”, not “special” — just “man”.

Pop looked at the keys and then over to the burning wreckage at the tower. He looked back down at the keys, but his attention was on the tower.

By this time, the man was close enough to the wreck to see that nothing had been done at all to help the situation by the onlookers. He saw only one car, and so he headed over to it. The car looked like it was laying peacefully next to the tower, catecorner, taking a nap on its side. In the driver’s side seat was a boy of about seventeen years in appearance, also napping — unconscious — between his driver-side window and an airbag.

As big as the tower was, the SUV, motionlessly laying to one side of the tower, looked like it was trying to hug a tree. What occurred was that the SUV, in a last ditch attempt to stop, had flipped with such force that the SUV had furiously slammed into the tower with it’s bottom side and bounced off from the force. In a more violent world, you might say that the tower had sucker-punched the SUV.

For all that, the fire that had started at the base of the tower was still in need of an explanation. The man was looking around for the cause, and then, being close enough now, he saw that the control box for the tower’s all-important electric power transformer, which the SUV was using as a sort of pillow at the moment, was crushed flat, stomped like a soda can. To the man, it looked like the destroyed control box was the source of the fire, which screamed of danger on its own and practically yelled itself hoarse to the man that it was only a few feet from the power transformer.

Fearing the worst for the situation, the man looked behind him to find that pop had brought the truck around as close as it could get for all the traffic. Running over to the back of the truck, the man threw open the doors, grabbed his tool belt, and ran over to the SUV. Climbing up the side of the overturned SUV, the man proceeded to open the driver’s side door with his back to the flames. The airbag had failed to disengage. Taking the X-Acto knife from his belt, the man released the blade, covered his face, and slashed the airbag like a tire. In the following moment, accentuated by the “POP!” of the airbag, the man had reached in like the jaws of life and grabbed the boy up out of the SUV.

With a sudden “BOOM!” and shockwave from the transformer, the man knew the fire had spread and the worst-case scenario was in tow. Jumping down off the SUV, the boy held length-wise across his arms, the man landed with a “THUD!” From there it was a short dash to the safety of the backside of his truck. Pop was there, cellphone in hand.

“I keep trying to call 9-1-1, but I can’t get through,” pop told the man.

“Tower’s down.” The man said between breaths as he laid the boy down on the ground. “Not gonna do you any good. Besides, look at the traffic.”

Pop turned around to see cars in every direction — vultures, waiting to eat up the scene.

Standing up, the man drew out a dolly from the back of his truck. Laying the jacket he was wearing on top of it, the man commanded pop, “Help me get him on there.” Pop, while he meant no ill-will towards the boy, just stood there. “He has to get to the hospital. Come on!”

It was at this point that the man realized he was on his own in the endeavor to save the boy’s life. Managing to get the boy onto the dolly with difficulty, the man pushed pop aside to get to a length of rope located inside the truck. Tying both ends of the rope to the dolly, the man got behind the rope and began pulling the dolly like a sled dog in a race for the boy’s life.

Leaving the horrible accident scene behind, the man mushed across the street to the sidewalk, crowded with just as many onlookers as the street, but the sidewalk’s obstacles could be moved. Yelling like an ambulance siren, the man pushed through the sidewalk up the emergency care entrance, which had street access to the main road in the city.

Getting the boy through the double-doors on his own, the man called out with all he had left to the attendant who was supposed to be attending the door.