CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO

Into the Fire, Part 2

“Master, can you tell if there’s someone up here?” Sam asked.

No, kid… the fire’s messing up the system’s radar tool. You’re going to have to check for yourself.

“Triple-A has radar?” Sam repeated. “Seriously?”

Lesson number five, kid. Concentrate!

Sam crouched low to avoid the smoke. He crawled over burning wood — wincing every time the fire touched his skin and then sighing with relief as Regeneration kicked in — toward the source of that cough. It wasn’t long until he found a dead body on the floor. What little of it that wasn’t blackened and burned told Sam he was staring down at a woman.

“Holy Zeus…” Sam whispered.

He pulled out two drachmas from his pocket and placed them over the sockets that had once contained her eyes. They were little more than goo now.

“For the ferryman… may he carry you swiftly to a brighter shore…” Sam recited.

There was a groan ahead of him, forcing Sam’s gaze forward. That’s when he saw a pale hand sticking out of several pieces of fallen ceiling. The fingers twitched to life.

Whoever was underneath the rubble groaned a second time.

“Hold on,” he said. “I’m coming!”

Sam didn’t even hesitate to slip his fingers into the space between the pieces of rubble despite the fact that they were on fire too. He just gritted his teeth and pushed the rubble up.

Once again, he couldn’t help but be amazed by Triple-A’s effects on his body and how this new and improved version of him could actually lift the largest piece of rubble up and off whoever was underneath it without too much difficulty.

“It’s alright now,” Sam said as he pulled off piece after piece from the body lying on the ground. He’d even forgotten to flinch as the fire burned off more and more of his clothes. “I’m going to save you!”

Seconds ticked by while Sam went to work. Sweat dripped down his face and soaked the inside of his jacket — what remained of it. The sleeves on his arms had already burned away nearly to the shoulders. The skin underneath was raw and cracking from the heat. Yet, despite the pain, Sam continued to work.

It was sometime later when he finally removed enough pieces to pull the man out from under what remained.“Hold on,” he encouraged. “Hold on!’

Sam dragged the man over to the stairs and then fire-man-carried him down to the second floor which the flames had yet to completely consume.

Now Sam had a choice to make. He could take the man all the way down and out into the street where he or Miracle Girl could heal him. But that would mean he would lose precious seconds, and Sam wasn’t sure the woman on the roof had much time left. His second choice was to heal the man right now and hope he wouldn’t lose too much life force that he couldn’t climb back up the stairs afterward.

“Dude’s buck-naked,” he realized.

The fire had burned out all of his clothes. Which made it strange, Sam thought, that the flames hadn’t burned his skin off too.

“He could be gifted,” Sam guessed.

The man was pale, paler than anyone Sam had ever seen before and that was a list that included a heavily injured Thunder. He was bald too, but Sam didn’t think the fire was responsible for that.

Sam checked his wrist for a pulse. “He’s still alive…”

The nostrils of the man’s long, pointed nose flared. Then his eyes, a strikingly bright crimson, blinked open.

“Yes!” The tension in Sam’s shoulders relaxed a little. “You really are still alive.”

A confused look flitted across the man’s face as he gazed up at Sam. This was quickly replaced by some heavy-duty coughing spasm.

Sam helped the bald man sit up and patted his back while the coughing fit continued.

“Are you hurt anywhere?” he asked. “I can heal you if you need it.”

The man shook his head as the coughing subsided.

“Wh-what happened?” he asked in a raspy voice.

Sam pointed a thumb up the staircase.

“The apartment caught fire, and you were trapped underneath a collapsed portion of the ceiling,” Sam explained quickly.

The confusion on the man’s face got even more pronounced the more he listened to Sam tell his story.

“A-and… you rescued me, did you?” the man asked in an accent that was clearly British.

Sam nodded, although deep down he wished he’d arrived in time to save the woman too.

“Can you walk on your own or do you need help to get down to the lobby?” he asked.

“I-I’ll manage…” the man replied with a shake of his head. “What about you?”

Sam’s gaze drifted up the staircase.

“There’s someone else who needs saving up there,” he answered.

As Sam’s gaze returned to the man, he could have sworn he’d caught him grinning widely back at Sam. It wasn’t the supportive sort of grin either, but the kind that wouldn’t have been uncommon on a mischievous clown’s face. The sight of it sent a chill down Sam’s spine. The man’s face quickly reverted into a pained expression though, making Sam rethink what he imagined he saw.

“I-I can get down on my own,” the man insisted.

“O-okay,” Sam replied.

He helped the man to his feet and watched him begin his slow descent down to the lobby. The man turned back only once to wave goodbye, and Sam couldn’t help but notice that he didn’t look like he’d nearly died in a fiery blaze. He seemed much too steady suddenly.

Sam frowned. “Get a grip… Don’t wig out.”

As Sam resumed his climb up the staircase, he couldn’t help shake the feeling that something was off. Perhaps he should have insisted on bringing the bald man to the lobby where Wolf-Woman was probably still waiting.

“Stop second-guessing yourself, lame-brain,” he chided himself. Then he frowned. “Great, I’m starting to sound like Thunder…”

What remained of the roof’s emergency door was on the other side of the fourth floor’s long hallway which looked to Sam like he was peering into a tunnel of fire.

The floors had mostly burned away, leaving holes big enough to make crossing through it a tough challenge. If that wasn’t bad enough, the smoke on this floor was so thick that even covering his mouth with the front of his jacket did nothing to stop Sam from inhaling the fumes.

He knew he was only conscious because his high-speed regenerative power was keeping him up. He also knew he couldn’t hold out for much longer.

“I… really… wish… Thunder… was around to… push me into gear,” Sam said between coughs.

Sam didn’t have time to crawl, so he opted to sprint forward instead. He relied on his quick movement speed and reaction time to help him through what was basically a trap floor. He jumped past large holes and tight-roped through what scant space of flooring he could find.

The system had sent him several notifications that Sam guessed were warnings about his health. He didn’t have time to read them and he didn’t need to anyway because Sam could feel his life force ebbing away with each second he was in that tunnel of fire.

Eventually, after his skin felt too raw to touch, and he’d actually coughed out blood, Sam leaped through the broken-down door at the other end of the hallway and rolled out onto the roof.

He was desperate to gulp down air, but the smoke was nearly as bad out here as it was inside.

“Mom, look!” yelled the voice of a little boy. “A hero’s come to save us!”

“He looks dead, though,” added a second high-pitched voice Sam guessed belonged to a girl.

“Don’t look, kids,” replied the voice Sam had heard shouting for help. “Just don’t look…”

Sam wasn’t dead, but he must have looked that way by now. So it must have been quite a shock to the mother and her children when he slowly raised himself off the ground while looking like an extra from a zombie horror movie.

The girl unleashed a high-pitched scream that her mother emulated. The little boy, though, just said, “Cool!”

Sam raised his palms up to show them he was a friend because his voice wasn’t working at the moment. Perhaps his lungs had been too damaged and Regeneration had yet to heal that part of him.

He shuffled forward, wide-eyed and coughing. Sadly, the mother and daughter took his movements as some kind of threat. Their screams only got more pronounced.

Behind you, kid! Dodge!

The master’s warning had come too late, because Sam could already feel a heavy boot strike him on the back, forcing him to topple over. There was a slight scuffle on the ground, but at the end, Sam found himself with his back to the cement while staring up at the figure who had mounted him.

He wore a black cowl with a pointed nose tip that reminded Sam of a bird’s beak. On his chest was a symmetrically pleasing symbol of a black bird with its wings stretched to the sides. The skin around the mouth, the only part of him the man underneath the cowl that Sam could see, was chocolate in hue.

Sam recognized that symbol instantly as he was a fan of the hero who wore it.

“You’re…” he could barely speak. “Crow-Man…”