King of superheroes, p.13
King of Superheroes, page 13
Chapter Nine
“A car accident?” Rhiannon’s voice sounded horrified as she repeated Dahlia’s words.
“That’s right,” our mentor said with a curt nod. “Three vehicles involved, multiple casualties, no ambulances on scene yet. So let’s go.”
“Just like that?” I asked as I hurried toward the open side door.
“The real world doesn’t wait for you to be ready,” Dahlia snapped as she climbed into the driver’s seat of the blacked-out van and motioned for us to get in.
I hauled the side door open all the way and waited for my gang to jump in the back, and then I followed suit as Dahlia put our van into reverse and backed out of the space.
She deftly stomped on the brake pedal and spun the steering wheel in order to turn in a sharp one-eighty, and then she punched pedal to the metal and took off with a protesting screech from the van’s back tires. I just shared a slightly nervous glance with my team as we all buckled up without saying a word.
The roads, houses, palm trees, and pedestrians shot past us at a crazy speed, and yet Dahlia kept pushing the black van even faster. The five of us kept quiet in the back, probably because we were all unsure of what to even say until we knew exactly what we were up against.
I knew fledglings only really dealt with smaller disasters, robberies and domestic disputes, things like that… But I hadn’t banked on literally having life and death dumped at our feet on the very first call out.
But there was nothing quite like jumping in headfirst, so I ground my jaw, kept my fingers flexed, and tried to mentally prepare myself for what we were about to see.
Even after years of watching hospital dramas and reality television that followed EMTs, I was still completely unprepared for the chaos that greeted us when Dahlia eventually killed the van’s engine.
Our mentor immediately hopped out of the driver’s seat and yanked the sliding door open, and the five of us stepped out onto smoking-hot asphalt.
Three vehicles were strewn across the road and were so heavily mangled that they were almost unrecognizable. The largest of the bunch, an SUV maybe, was crushed in the front almost all the way up to the driver’s seat. It was a mangled mess of steaming metal and broken glass, and there was a grisly splatter of blood against the windshield.
The other two cars hadn’t fared any better. The one to our left had been hit in the side, and the passenger door was so crushed that it was concave and looked like it had folded in on itself. The mirror was hanging on by a literal thread, but I thankfully couldn’t see a passenger behind the cracked glass.
The last car looked to be the one that hadn’t suffered as badly as the other two, but its back axle was still bent at an almost ninety-degree angle, which I could tell because the vehicle was completely on its side with the undercarriage facing us.
Like our mentor said, there weren’t any ambulances or police on scene yet, but I wasn’t too surprised by that. After the emergence of heroes, funding for emergency services had been slowly cut over the years, and a lot of the work was pawned off on heroes. I’d also heard the Federation had a department of supers with premonition abilities, which they used to get the jump on crimes and disasters so they could send out heroes ahead of emergency services.
Which meant we were responsible for the lives of these people for the time being.
“Shit,” I breathed, and then my instincts almost immediately took over.
I turned to my team with a steely look on my face, while Dahlia just leaned against the black van like before and waited for us to do something.
“Hannah,” I said sharply as I turned to the blonde. “Do you hear anyone?”
“I…” The Dreamer faltered, and her blue eyes were filled with panicked tears. “What do you mean?”
“Do you hear anyone?” I repeated. “In the cars?”
“The… Oh, god, the SUV, the driver’s still in there.” Hannah’s voice cracked, but she cleared her throat and blinked the tears away. “The car on its side still has two passengers trapped in there, but I don’t think there’s anyone in the car to the left. The SUV driver’s unconscious… I think. I don’t know.”
“Good job,” I told her with a nod, and I put a reassuring hand on her shoulder.
“I can lift the passengers out of the overturned car,” Rhiannon offered, and her big green eyes were laced with even more fear than Hannah’s had been, but the flying Tempest fledgling nodded up to me with new determination on her face.
“I’ll heal them as best I can before we move them,” Danny said quickly. “Let’s go.”
I watched as Danny and Rhiannon hurried over to the upturned car, and then I turned back to Frank and Hannah.
“What do we do?” Frank asked in a voice choked with worry.
“We need to make sure that gas tank doesn’t catch fire,” I said grimly as I nodded to the SUV. “Engine’s in the front, and it’s pretty mangled.”
“I can do that,” Frank said quickly. “I can pull any kinda spark out of there, no problem.”
“Do it,” I said. “Hannah and I will get the driver out.”
The three of us immediately ran over to the half-crushed SUV, and Frank quickly focused on the crumpled innards while Hannah and I hurried around to the driver’s side.
The splatter of blood on the windshield wasn’t the worst of it, and I could see the driver’s face was badly cut from his temple all the way down his cheek toward his neck. His seat belt had stopped him from being catapulted straight out of the windshield, but the force of the impact had caused his shoulder to become dislocated, and it sat at a gruesome angle.
I couldn’t see any other obvious injuries, and I sent up a silent prayer to whatever god was listening that the guy still had both his legs. But he was still unconscious, and I needed to take a minute to rack my brain and think of what to do to get him out without causing him any more pain or further injuries.
A crowd had started to form around the accident site, and shouts and worried screams started to build and build as panic began to spread.
“Can you wake him up?” I suddenly turned to Hannah with an idea.
“How?” she asked, and her face had become even more pale at the sight of the injured driver.
“You can read his mind, right?” I asked quickly. “Can you extend that? Communicate telepathically with him?”
“I-I don’t know if that’d work,” Hannah said as she fretfully chewed on her lower lip. “Maybe, I…”
“Just give it a try,” I told her. “I’m gonna tell people that they need to stay back.”
I turned to where the crowd of onlookers were watching us work, and I held both of my hands up in as commanding a pose as I could muster.
“Ladies and gents, if you could just keep back!” I shouted as loudly as I could. “Stay back, we need the space to work!”
“Who are you?” one of the bystanders demanded.
I didn’t want to say we were fledglings, in case that caused the panic to overload. In fairness, if I’d been involved in a literal life-threatening car crash, I would’ve much preferred an actual seasoned superhero to help out.
Hell, I’d have even taken a trained EMT.
But instead they had us, five fledglings who were as green as summer grass and didn’t really know what the hell they were doing. I didn’t want them to know that.
“We’re here to help!” I yelled back. “But in order for us to do that, we’re gonna need you all to stay calm. Has someone called 911?”
“They’re on their way,” an older lady said quickly, and she waved her cell phone around so I could see. “I called them just before you guys turned up.”
“Thank you, ma’am,” I told her with a stern nod. “Just keep back, okay? We don’t know how dangerous the situation still is, and I don’t intend on having anyone else end up in the emergency room.”
I turned back to where my fledgling team was already hard at work, and I caught Dahlia’s hard black eyes from where she was still leaning against the driver’s door of the van.
Our mentor gave me a stern, approving nod, so I quickly got to work.
“Mark!” Hannah called my name from the wreckage of the SUV, and I hurried back over to her.
The blonde mind reader was flushed in the face, with a thin sheen of sweat on her lightly freckled skin, and her blue eyes were wide with worry.
“I can’t get the driver to respond,” she told me frantically as I stopped in my tracks beside her. “He’s unconscious, so I can’t get him to open up to me.”
“I’m still holding this gas tank!” Frank called out from the front of the mangled SUV. “I think I’ve pulled any kinda firestarter out of there, but I can’t be one hundred percent certain.”
I looked over my shoulder, to where Rhiannon and Danny had already managed to free one of the trapped passengers in the car that was sprawled on its side, and then turned back to the SUV.
“Keep trying to talk to him, Hannah,” I told the Dreamer. “If you can get him to wake up and stay calm, then we’ll have a much easier time of this. Frank, keep anything flammable away from that gas tank, okay?”
They both nodded and mumbled words of affirmation, and I ground my jaw determinedly as I headed closer to what used to be the driver’s side door.
It was a twisted mess of metal and shattered glass, and I could see the driver still slumped in his seat.
The side of his face still oozed blood in a continuous stream, and even just from that I knew we had to free him as soon as possible so Danny could see to his injuries. I just hoped the healer from the Corps pillar could also put a dislocated shoulder back in, because the way the SUV driver’s limp arm strained against the seat belt was like something out of a horror movie.
The metal step up to the driver’s door was still intact, so I hooked one foot onto it and then focused on my super strength. Every time I’d used it, for training or performing, it had come to me as easily as breathing.
But now, when it was a matter of life and death, I felt myself faltering.
“You can do this, Mark…” I heard Hannah mutter behind me.
I smiled when I realized the Dreamer could probably hear the general gist of my worry, and then I applied all of my focus onto the car door with a determined frown.
The window was smashed, so I quickly shrugged out of my flannel shirt and wrapped it around my hand to protect me from the glass that still stuck out of the warped metal frame. I placed my other hand flush against the bodywork of the SUV, and then I pulled with every bit of strength I could muster.
There was a brief moment where nothing happened, and the metal just groaned and complained and didn’t budge, until suddenly I ripped the entire door away with a loud grunt.
I heard the crowd behind me gasp in unison.
“Told you…” Hannah said from somewhere behind me, and I let out a breathless chuckle.
I threw the mangled metal of the door away from the SUV, where it clattered and sparked against the asphalt, and then I turned my focus on the driver. I couldn’t see any more major wounds aside from the bleeding on his head, and I was glad this guy wasn’t sitting in the car seat holding his insides in his hands.
I knew it definitely could’ve been a hell of a lot worse, and if anything, I should feel lucky that as far as first missions go, this was fairly straightforward.
I watched in my periphery as Rhiannon and Danny helped the second passenger out of the upturned car, with Rhiannon utilizing her flying ability to make sure the victims didn’t have to move all that much, and then Danny mostly healed them before their feet were even set back down on the ground.
“I’ve got something!” Hannah suddenly gasped beside me, and I whirled around to turn to the blonde.
“What is it?” I asked.
“The driver, he… Oh…” Hannah bit her bottom lip and shook her head. “I can’t make out exactly, but his… His legs… He says he can’t feel his legs…”
“We’ve got a healer,” I said out loud, for Hannah’s sake as much as I was speaking to the still unconscious driver. “Just try and tell him everything will be okay, keep him calm, and try to wake him up all the way, okay?”
“Okay,” Hannah exhaled sharply. “Okay, yeah, I can do that.”
“Frank, how’s that engine looking?” I called over the crumpled hood of the vehicle.
“Not great!” my pyromancer buddy admitted. “There’s a spark bouncing around near the fuel line.”
“Keep it the hell away from there,” I told him. “I need to get this guy out before we let this thing burn.”
“We’ve got a bigger crowd, too,” Frank grunted, and I glanced over to the sidewalk where several more onlookers were staring at the grisly scene.
“Shit…” I cursed under my breath. “Okay, let’s get this thing moving. I need to get this guy out, but I don’t wanna injure him any more.”
The moment Hannah had mentioned that he couldn’t feel his legs, my mind had immediately gone to the possibility of an internal spinal injury. And the main rule was never to move them, but I had a healer on my superhero team, and I figured that allowed for maybe some wiggle room.
“Danny!” I called out to my healer friend from the Corps pillar.
He was hunched over one of the passengers from the upturned car, but he looked up when I called his name.
“What is it?” he shouted back.
“I think this guy might have a spinal injury, but Frank’s holding off a gas tank explosion. If I move him, and make anything worse, would you still be able to heal him?”
“As long as the injury isn’t set, yes, I can heal him!” Danny yelled above the chaos. “Just get him out of there!”
“But be careful,” Hannah added in a surprisingly quiet voice. “He’s hurting.”
I answered only with a nod before I reluctantly leaned over the unconscious driver and tried to find the clasp to release his seat belt. I was so close to him that I could feel his ragged breathing fan across my face, and I could smell the tangy metallic scent of his blood as it seeped from his head.
He didn’t make a sound or move an inch when I finally found the button and released the seatbelt, but he slumped forward almost immediately. I caught him in my arms, and I grimaced as his head lulled against my shoulder and covered me almost immediately in the sticky red substance.
“Good job,” Hannah said quickly.
“Still more work to do,” I said with a grunt as I kept my grip around his waist and gingerly lowered myself down from the step on the door.
I carried the bleeding driver a little further away from the wreck of his SUV and gently lowered him onto the asphalt. I couldn’t see any particular injury to his legs, but I hadn’t checked his back, so it could’ve been a spinal thing.
Danny spotted us and immediately hurried over.
“What do we got besides the potential spine injury?” the healer demanded.
“Head injury and dislocated shoulder, but Hannah heard him think that he can’t feel his legs.” I quickly rattled off the ailments and then turned to my blonde Dreamer. “Can you still talk to him?”
“Yes,” Hannah said as she furrowed her brow. “Well, I think so, I mean I have been this whole time, but I don’t know if he can hear me properly.”
“It’d be a comfort to him, I’m sure of it.” Danny nodded approvingly up at Hannah as he crouched over the injured man. “Keep doing it. Healing this isn’t gonna be fun for him.”
Hannah crouched down to touch the driver on the side of his head where he wasn’t bleeding, and I left the Corps healer to work as I skittered back over to Frank. My fellow Conduit had sweat beading across his forehead as his arms began to shake, and when he tried to grin at me reassuringly, the expression was more of a grimace than anything else.
“It’s gotten closer.” Frank’s voice was a strained huff, and he broke eye contact so he could stare at the crumpled hood with even more concentration on his face. “I didn’t realize how close it was. I’ve been holding it, but I don’t know for how much longer I can keep it there.”
“Okay, just back away a little,” I said to him in as strong a voice as I could muster. “If it blows, I don’t want you to take it to the face.”
“This ugly thing?” Frank cracked a joke but couldn’t bring himself to laugh properly, so it came out as more of a whimper. “Danny’ll make me pretty again, I’m sure.”
“Just take a few steps back,” I repeated. “Easy does it.”
“If this thing blows, you need to control it.” Frank grunted as he took a shuddering step backward. “Send it into the sky or something.”
“I can only manipulate fire,” I said. “You can control the spark. If we do this right, we can set it off in a controlled sort of way.”
“That’s some firefighter hero speak,” Frank said with a strained laugh. “But okay. That could work.”
“I need to get the crowd to move back,” I said to my friend. “Can you hold it a little longer?”
“Just hurry up,” he panted breathlessly. “I got this.”
I spun on my heel to hurry over to the ever-growing crowd, and I felt a sudden smile form on my face when I spotted Rhiannon doing the exact same thing. The brunette looked around at me with a breathless smile on her face, and I could tell that despite the life-and-death situation, she was enjoying her first outing as a superhero in training.
I shared her smile, because damn if I didn’t feel cool, too.
Then I turned to the crowd, held both of my hands up with my palms outward, and spoke in as commanding a voice as I could muster.
“We need everyone to take a few steps back!” I yelled. “We’re going to be performing a controlled explosion, and it’s for your own safety that you move away from the crash site!”
“The EMTs are on their way!” the lady with the cell phone told me as she staggered backward. “They told me five minutes, but that was five minutes ago.”
“Everything is gonna be okay, ma’am.” I nodded to her appreciatively. “Thank you for your cooperation. Now, everyone, please take a step back.”
I took a step forward with my palms still out, and then I took another lurch forward to make the crowd move even further.
