by Hal Bodner
The worst part of trying to rescue civilians is usually the civilians themselves. There’s no kind or polite way of telling them to shut up, hang limp, and let themselves be rescued. Too many of them insist on trying to help you help them and end up making things worse. My biggest pet peeve is that there’s always one, one person who demands to be the center of attention, even though they’re virtually uninjured. You know the type. The self-absorbed businessman who complains about the damage to his new BMW while the paramedics are trying to save the lives of the people in the battered Toyota he hit because he felt he was too important to yield. The spoiled kid who blubbers dramatic crocodile tears at the scene of someone else’s tragedy to improve her chances of going viral online. The neighbor who uses his five minutes of televised fame to tell the world about how terrified he was for his family when the police finally apprehended the criminal who has been quietly hiding in a house only a few streets away, not bothering anyone for the past ten years.
“We could have all been murdered in our beds!”
Yeah. Those people. And the screaming woman was a quintessential example.
Her clothing bore not a trace of soot. Her makeup was as pristine as if it had been freshly applied. Yet, there she stood, in the midst of her crippled and dying co-workers, making a fuss as if she was the only victim in sight and working my last gay nerve. Without further ado, I marched up to her and delivered a healthy slap to one side of her face. Silence descended immediately. Her eyes rolled back into her skull and I caught her before she hit the ground.
One of the paramedics saw what I’d done and looked at me, aghast.
“Best way to deal with hysteria. Didn’t they teach you that in ambulance school?” I deftly handed him her limp form.
“Thank God you’re here!” He seemed to accept my justification for…er…for gently admonishing the civilian as he struggled with his armful of unconscious hysterical woman.
I flexed my chest muscles, knowing how impressive that looked. Besides, he was very good-looking.
“Never fear!” I announced in my deepest and most manly voice, “the Whirlwind is here!” I know it’s hackneyed. Also, as a snarky reporter once pointed out, I ripped it off from Underdog. But one has to say something in these situations and, the simpler you keep it, the better.
“How many are still inside?”
He may have looked like a matinee hero but he seemed a bit shell-shocked himself. He nodded and opened his mouth. Closed it again. Opened it. Finally, he just pointed at the ruined building.
“Yes, I see that. It’s a building. A burning building. That’s falling down. With, you know, people still inside? I was wondering if, maybe, you knew how many or where they might be trapped? Since you’re wearing that nifty uniform and you have that cool walkie-talkie and all.”
His only response was to point again.
“You do know how lucky you are that you’re pretty, right? Because, if you had to rely on…” I tapped my own forehead and sighed, “…you’d be out of luck.”
With a theatrical furl of my cape, I left the Good-Looking Brain-Dead Paramedic Guy behind, shouldered through the people still fleeing the lobby, and strode into the building.
Though most of my unusual abilities made their appearance around the time I first discovered hair under my arms, some things are directly attributable to the accident in Travis’ lab. I first discovered my weird proximity sense not long after the Whirlwind made his first public appearance. It was while I was helping Gretchen find a kid who had been kidnaped by his deadbeat dad and held for ransom. Her people corralled the perp in a four-story parking structure, but not before the guy had stashed Junior in the trunk of a stolen car. Model parent that he was, he’d also attached a bomb to the kid. Apparently, the police were supposed to back off and let him escape. Otherwise…kaboom.
We had no time to go banging on all the car trunks to find the kid, and the computer experts were taking their own sweet time in running the plates of recently stolen vehicles. Cursing the fact that I did not have x-ray vision, I ran frantically up and down the rows of vehicles, abundantly conscious of time running out, and praying I’d notice something to clue me in on which trunk hid the kid.
I don’t know how to describe what happened other than as a shift in my mind. The closest thing like it is when you’re jiggling a recalcitrant new key in a door lock. Just when it seems like you’re going to have to go back to the hardware store and have them re-cut it, it slides right in and everything clicks the way it’s supposed to.
Suddenly, I knew where the kid was hidden. I made a beeline for the right car and rescued the little tyke who, incidentally, thanked me by smearing tears and snot all over the front of my costume. The cops relieved me of the little monster, who promptly got their uniforms all snotty and wet, and told me that the Bomb Squad was caught in traffic.
Travis could probably have defused the thing in a heartbeat. On the other hand, I’m not mechanical at all. I had a flat tire once and, had I not been able to flag down a pair of lesbians on their way to a folk music festival, I’d still be standing helplessly by the side of the road. Having no idea what to do with the bomb, I snatched it up, raced to the roof of the garage, wrapped my body around it… and waited.
In the end, the mission was successful. The poppet was reunited with its mother. The kidnapper was doing ten-to-twenty in the Centerport Penitentiary. Gretchen got some great media coverage out of the thing. Everyone was happy, except for the incarcerated father, of course.
And as for me, I’d just like to say that if you’ve never had half a dozen sticks of dynamite explode between your navel and your groin, it is not something I’d recommend putting on your bucket list. Just because I’m physically indestructible doesn’t mean that I don’t feel pain as intensely as normal folks. Normally, even a mildly sexy look from my husband turns me on but during the week after the explosion, the slightest stiffening of Little Alec stimulated acute waves of nausea that seemed to start in my balls and settle deep in my stomach. I had to concoct a fib about eating a bad taco to explain to Peter why I had to run to the bathroom and puke every time he touched me.
The first thing I did when I entered the Special Projects Building was to close my eyes and concentrate. I figured the fifth floor, where the labs were, was where I’d be needed the most. Anyone above that would have made for the roof and, with any luck, the helicopters I’d seen were there to take them to safety, and not just shooting news footage for Yahoo. The floors below would have evacuated to the lobby. But there could be people who had survived the explosion, and were still trapped on five. As my senses expanded, I got the impression of roughly half a dozen pinpoints of varying degrees of fear–ranging from anxiety to outright terror.
In the interests of speed, I ignored the stairwells in favor of the elevator shafts. In less time that it takes to tell, I’d forced the doors open and was standing on top of the car, ready to shimmy up the cable. Looking up, I once again regretted not being able to fly. Superman could have soared through the breach in the wall and flown everyone to safety before the end credits rolled. The Whirlwind was going to have to get though what looked like a scene from the Towering Inferno only forty or fifty feet above where I stood.
I began the climb. The flames wouldn’t do me any lasting harm, but I was going to be in agony while I passed through them, so I kept moving as fast as I could. Even worse, I need to breathe just as much as the next guy. Travis doesn’t think I can actually drown or suffocate. He says that, instead, my body would shut down and go into a sort of hibernation. Using less scientific and far more embarrassing terminology, I faint. And oxygen is always scarce in the heart of a fire.
This was far from the first time I’d ever been caught in an inferno, but the feeling of being roasted alive is never one that I eagerly embrace. I doggedly gritted my teeth against the sensation of my flesh sizzling while I hauled myself up the cable. Whenever I’m shot, stabbed, lasered, or hit by a falling anvil, I try to respond with a n
onchalant “ouch” so that the bad guys know they’re outclassed. In this case, once it dawned on me that there was no one around to overhear, I cursed and screamed like a woman in labor. It’s surprising how much that helps to reduce the pain.
Once I reached the fifth floor, the leap from the steel cable to the access door was problematic. The angle was awkward and, even under the best of circumstances, my relationship with grace and coordination is tenuous. By a combination of bodily contortions and more cursing, I managed to perch precariously on the minuscule threshold with the shaft yawning below me. It was as much balance as it was luck that kept me from tumbling backwards through the flames and landed on my ass in the lobby again. I wedged my gloved hands into the tiny space between the doors and forced the doors open.
It was like being in that old Kurt Russell movie about the firemen. The instant the aperture was wide enough, a huge blast of superheated air surged into my face. My body was blown backward, across the elevator shaft, and slammed into the far wall hard enough to force every last molecule of air from my lungs and, incidentally, to leave a Whirlwind-sized dent in the concrete. On the plus side, I learned a valuable lesson about casually longing for things like the power of flight. The universe may perversely grant your wish in a way that is highly undesirable. Scrabbling madly, I managed to catch hold of some half-melted conduit, more by chance than by design, and spared myself the humiliation of falling ass over teakettle down five floors.
Once I’d pulled myself through and stood with both legs planted safely, relatively speaking, on the carpeted floor, I needed no sixth sense to figure out where the trapped people were. The screams for help coming from the rest room at the far end of the hall were a veritable beacon.
Bits of things that had fallen from the walls, a few ceiling panels, and some other detritus were aflame in small piles that dotted the hall. The leaves of a lone potted plant and the cushions on a bench against the wall blazed merrily, and there were a few tiny lines of flame chewing across the carpet from one wall to the other where some wiring had come down and was stretched across. But the path to the bathroom was largely clear, and getting to it was a walk in the park compared to what I’d just been through. In seconds, I pushed open the door and leapt into the restroom.
“Never fear!” I proclaimed. “Whirlwind is… Oh, for Christ’s sake!”
The scene that greeted me was not encouraging. There were five of them, all dripping wet like puppies that had just climbed out of a sack some miscreant teenager had hurled into the river. One of them, at least, had the smarts to get everyone to douse themselves with water from the sinks before the fire had compromised the plumbing and the taps had run dry. The bedraggled group looked wet, miserable and terrified.
A middle-aged gent with severe burns on one side of his body, was being tended to by a gigantic woman in her late thirties. Melissa McCarthy, before she lost all the weight, looked like an anorexic Gwyneth Paltrow in comparison to this gal, and I did not look forward to the prospect of carrying her to safety. More problematic was the youngish guy who was shaking from head to toe. At first, I thought it was because he was terrified but, when I realized he was in a wheelchair, I figured he must have some type of palsy. The remaining two refugees were a dour-faced older woman, and a twenty-something hipster chick wearing designer knock-offs. The girl looked frightened enough to pass out at any second; the older broad looked annoyed, but I couldn’t tell whether it was because she was inconvenienced by the fire, because I wasn’t from the Fire Department, or because she was accustomed to being pissed off at the world in general.
I was here but, for once, ingenuity had failed me. I still had no idea how I was going to get them out safely. I had a momentary, cartoon-like vision of myself pitching the fat one out the window to act as a cushion for the others, but I dismissed the notion as uncharitable.
I cast around the bathroom, seeking something helpful, and knowing I probably wouldn’t know it even if I saw it. Fortunately, we were on the opposite side of the building from the explosion, so we had a few minutes before things got literally too hot to handle. Before I could finish taking stock of the situation, the Designer Debbie-type decided to take my arrival as permission to freak out. She threw herself at my feet, blubbering “Thank God! Thank God!”, and wrapped her arms around the backs of my thighs so that, even if there was a path to safety, I wouldn’t be able to lead them along it without tripping.
Okay, Alec, I told myself while I thought about how I could effectively take command of the situation. Deep breathing. Remain calm and centered. Remember, they’re civilians and you are a professional. Above all, relax.
Panic in a crisis does nobody any good. This, I knew. What I did not know was what the hell to do next. Recently, Peter and I had seen a re-run of the old Kung Fu TV show. David Carradine was always able to get himself out of inescapable predicaments by closing his eyes and using Eastern mysticism to center himself until a solution presented itself. I figured, why not? Then, the minute I shut my eyes, I remembered how Carradine had ended up in real life, and I reconsidered.
First things first, I told myself instead.
I limped to the window with the hipster chick still humping my leg like a randy cocker spaniel. An open window beckoned from the building directly opposite, challenging me to find a way to span the alley. Hands down, the window won the dare. There was no way of getting any of these people across short of chucking them over, one by one, and hoping that my aim was good. Briefly, I entertained thoughts of ripping the plumbing out of the walls and getting everyone to shimmy down the pipes to safety. A second look at my burned, crippled, overweight, hysterical, and/or senile charges and I knew that plan was doomed to failure as well.
What I needed was to buy us a few minutes so I could brainstorm. I shook my leg a few times to loosen the woman’s death-grip, whereupon I began ripping the metal stall partitions out of the floor. I’d stacked several of them against the wall when the older secretary planted herself in my way, with hands on hips, looking at me with arrogant disdain.
“Yes?” I tried not to let my irritation show.
“What are the rest of us supposed to do while you’re remodeling the bathroom?”
“We need to give ourselves some extra time to escape.”
“You have no idea what you’re doing, do you?”
She pursed her lips, shook her head with mock pity and made a grating tsking noise with her tongue.
“I know exactly what I’m doing.”
During a rescue, it’s not uncommon for some idiot to get it into their head that she knows better than I do. She’ll assume that brains and brawn cannot possibly go hand in hand. Since my physical strength is obvious, I must therefore be mentally deficient.
“Pardon me, Mister Sensitive Feelings!” She crossed her arms prissily and continued to glare at me while I stacked the partitions, all the while with one eyebrow cocked as if she was waiting for me to impress her.
“I get it!” she announced with palpable sarcasm. “We’ll launch them from the window like flying carpets. We’ll just glide down to the ground. Imagine that. Prancing around like Aladdin at my age.” I ignored her but apparently ignoring her wasn’t enough. “No? Maybe we’ll drop them strategically so they’ll stack up like a house of cards. We’ll scamper down to safety like squirrels.”
“How about if we cool it with the smart-ass comments, lady?” I swiftly moved the metal panels to the bathroom door and fashioned a ramshackle barricade.
“It’s a fire break,” I announced triumphantly.
“A fire break.” She waited for a long moment before dryly informing everyone within earshot, “We’re doomed.”
Hipster chick immediately began keening at the top of her lungs.
Whenever possible, one wants to avoid insulting the hapless victims of tragedy who one is trying to rescue. However, one cannot always resist temptation.
“Thanks ever so much for helping,” I told her with sweet venom. “I don’t need to be her
e, you know. I could be home doing something more important. Like scrubbing the rings from my toilet bowl.”
The two of us glared at each other while the girl wrapped herself around my ankles again and screamed, “Ohmigod! Ohmigod! Don’t leave us!”
I thought through and discarded several options, while the older woman continued to frown at me like the explosion was my fault. She tapped her foot impatiently until I was tempted to rip off her leg if she didn’t stop. Throughout, the girl kept sobbing all over my kneecaps and kept shrieking to high hell. A major migraine started to bloom behind my eyeballs.
I’d had enough.
“Will you please shut up!” I grabbed the girl by the collar of her ersatz Dior blouse and hauled her upright. “One more scream, one shriek, one freaking peep out of you and I swear… What the hell do you want?”
The last was directed at the guy in the wheelchair. He had rolled up beside me unnoticed and was tugging at the edge of my cape. Or maybe he had just taken hold of it. The tugging part could have been caused by the palsy.
“I ju…just th…th…th…thought…”
I bit back my sarcastic quip when I saw the expression on his face and realized that the stammer had nothing to do with his condition. The poor guy was a fan! His eyes were filled with awe at meeting his hero and he was completely tongue-tied. Had we not been on the verge of becoming Krispy Kritters, I’d have bet he’d have been popping wheelies back to his desk to grab something I could autograph.
Seeing his look of admiration and complete trust immediately put my irritation with the crotchety old broad and my annoyance with the Leg Humper into perspective. I was ashamed of myself. No one, not even a superhero, can be expected to be cordial and polite all of the time. All of us have bad days. The thing is, see, in my line of work, almost all the days are bad ones. That’s what I do. I interfere with other people’s bad days to make them better.
